BYLINE: Margaux Tenenbaum-Hollis, Senior Theatre Correspondent | IRREVERENT
The farmhouse sits at the end of a gravel drive in Sharon, Connecticut, flanked by birches that have the good taste not to be performing anything. It is, depending on your temperament, either serene or haunted. A wheel-thrown bowl slumps on the porch railing — asymmetrical, listing slightly right, like a politician's smile — and a pickleball paddle leans against the door like a weapon still shopping for its war.
I have come to spend an afternoon with Meryl Streep, who retired three weeks ago after watching Laurie Metcalf's performance as Willy Lomanretired three weeks ago after watching Laurie Metcalf's performance as Willy Loman and would like you to know that she is fine.
"I'm fine," she says, before I have sat down. She is wearing overalls. There is clay on her forearm. A Netflix executive named Brendan is in the mudroom, I am told, and he has been there since eleven.
THE PICKLEBALL PROBLEM
The Sharon Valley Morning Smash league meets at nine a.m. at the high school courts. Streep joined the week after her retirement announcement went out. She is, at present, undefeated.
"Nobody will play with me," she says, not sadly. She says it the way Chekhov characters say things about the cherry orchard — as fact, as weather, as something that requires neither explanation nor remedy.
The problem, as I understand it from a telephone call I made afterward to a league administrator named Donna, is twofold. First, Streep is very good. Second, Streep is very good at you. She reads the shot before you've decided to hit it. She anticipates the direction of your grief. "It's like she knows what you're going to do," Donna told me, "before you know what you're going to do. It's not fun to be known like that in pickleball."
Streep does not find this troubling. "The game has a beautiful structure," she says. "It rewards patience. It rewards reading the other person's body." She pauses. She picks up her coffee mug. "Also I've won thirty-seven games."
She is not gloating. This is the thing about Streep that critics have always misread: when she is devastating, she is not trying to devastate you. She is just present. The devastation is a byproduct.
FORTY-ONE BOWLS
The studio is a converted shed behind the main house. It smells of earth and kiln heat and, faintly, of a decision that has not yet been fully committed to.
"Forty-one," she says, gesturing at the shelves. They are arranged there in varying degrees of what I would charitably call sincerity — some taut, some baggy, some clearly the result of a conversation between the clay and its maker that ended in a draw. "I made forty-one bowls."
I ask if she has a favorite.
She looks at them for a long moment. "They're fine," she says. "I guess."
I have seen this exact expression on stage, in the third act of plays that understand what it costs a person to admit that something is merely adequate. It is the expression of someone who has spent a lifetime in proximity to transformation and is now reckoning with the possibility that the clay does not know who she is.
"I thought it would be meditative," she adds. "It is meditative. I just thought I would be better at it."
She throws another bowl while I watch. It is, objectively, better than the other forty-one. She looks at it. "Fine," she says. "I guess."
WILLY LOMAN, DIRECTED BY PHIL
The Sharon Community Playhouse production of Death of a Salesman opens in September. It is directed by Philip Hargreave, a retired periodontist from Canaan, who saw Streep at the farmers market in late May and — by his own account — simply asked.
She is playing Willy.
Not Linda. Willy.
"Phil thought it was an interesting choice," she says. She says this without inflection, which is its own kind of inflection.
I ask whether the Playhouse — which seats, I have confirmed, ninety-four people, and whose most recent production was Mamma Mia! with a synth track because the pianist had a conflicting commitment — had any concerns about the casting.
"Phil was very supportive," she says.
I ask whether Phil knew who she was when he offered her the role.
"He knew I had 'done some acting,'" she says. "His wife recognized me from Kramer vs. Kramer. He had not seen Kramer vs. Kramer."
There is a silence between us that I would describe as liminal. It occupies the space where irony would go if either of us were willing to name what is happening here, which is that the most decorated actor in the history of American cinema is three weeks into a retirement she has announced twice before, and is voluntarily preparing to deliver the "I am not a dime a dozen" speech to ninety-four people in a converted firehouse on Route 44, directed by a man who cleaned teeth for a living and thought it would be fun to do a little theatre.
"I think it's going to be good," she says. She means it. This is the thing that makes it heartbreaking.
BRENDAN FROM NETFLIX
He appears in the doorway between the kitchen and the mudroom at approximately three in the afternoon. He is holding a granola bar — Lärabar, cashew cookie — and a contract that I am not permitted to see but which is, I am told, "generous."
"I told him I'd think about it," Streep says.
"She said she'd think about it," Brendan confirms. He has the bearing of a man who has said the same thing in the mudrooms of other retired people and knows that thinking about it is a form of yes that has not yet been scheduled.
He returns to the mudroom. The granola bar is unopened.
THE CONFESSION
I am preparing to leave when she says it. Not asked, not prompted. She is looking out the window at the birches.
"I watched the Metcalf again," she says. "The bootleg. The one that's been going around."
Laurie Metcalf's Willy Loman. The performance that has been described, variously, as revelatory, epochal, and once — by a critic who has since retired to write a Substack about Portuguese wine — as "the most important thing to happen to the American stage in twenty-five years."
"And?" I say.
She tilts her head. The clay is still on her arm.
"Honestly," she says, "on second viewing, it's a B-plus."
She says this the way you say a thing you have been thinking for three weeks and have decided, finally, to say out loud. As fact. As weather.
As something that requires neither explanation nor remedy.
Outside, Brendan is still in the mudroom. The bowl on the porch railing is still listing right. The pickleball paddle is still waiting.
She is fine, she said.
I believe her less than I did three weeks ago.
Margaux Tenenbaum-Hollis is IRREVERENT's Senior Theatre Correspondent. She attended Yale School of Drama, a fact she mentions when relevant and also when it isn't.
WELL, DUH NOTICE: This is humor, the interview is fabricated. — The Editor