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"It was terribly intense," she says now. "Those years made me tired, crazy, nervous. I was constantly throwing up, on my way to an ulcer." She loathed the infighting for roles, she says; but she got the roles. Robert Lewis, a Yale drama professor, recalls a scene she did playing Alma in Tennessee Williams' Summer and Smoke. "It was certainly the best I ever saw that part played, and that's a reaction you don't usually feel when acting students do scenes, you know. It was so clinical you could hardly look at it. It was like looking into somebody's life." Lewis also marvels at Meryl's range. He recalls her flying about in a wheelchair, playing a crazy, octogenarian translator of Russian literature in a Christopher Durang play. "It was really the most imaginative farcical performance I've ever seen."
By the time this favored child of a dozen college directors received her degree from Yale in 1975, she was, in that odd way common to sensitive people who have received a great deal of praise, choking on success. "I resign myself to being lousy on opening nights," she says. "It's not getting easier, but harder. You look out and see people with pads in their laps judging you." That the judgments are nearly always ecstatic does not really help. She seems uncomfortable with the fact she was praised so highly (she received an Obie award) for her rousing performance last winter in a Public Theater musical, Alice in Concert, for which the playwright, her friend Elizabeth Swados, was roundly panned. "It's insane to have winners and losers in art. We live in a society plagued by sports mania. To say that one performance is better than another is just plain dumb. You wouldn't think of comparing two colors in a painting, would you; this blue is better than that blue?"
As a matter of fact, yes, you would. And Streep's remarkable parade of successes marched without a pause from Yale to New York. It does not seem accurate to speak of lucky breaks. Streep talked herself into a Public Theater audition for Pinero's Trelawny of the Wells and Impresario Joe Papp asked her to play a featured part. But the truth surely is that if it had not been Papp who took her in hand, it would have been some other director. The Trelawny role was followed by a spectacular success at Manhattan's Phoenix Theater, when she played two utterly different characters on the same evening, a sexy secretary in Arthur Miller's one-act A Memory of Two Mondays, and a 170-lb. floozie in Tennessee Williams' 27 Wagons Full of Cotton. Playgoers were shocked to realize that they were seeing the same actress. "That sort of thing is done all the time," she says now, "but to do it on the same night was considered pretty impressive."