Meryl Streep (Getty Images)

I can’t quite explain how it happened, but last night I found myself performing in my underwear for Meryl Streep.

Well, I can explain part of it—the part that wasn’t the direct result of the Gods of Off-Off-Broadway Theater.

My good friend Hanah Fazio wrote a play called “The Miss Woman Pageant 2013,” which was accepted into the Manhattan Repertory Theatre’s Spring One-Act Competition. Hanah invited me and two of our actor friends to perform in her show (fun fact about me: I was a theater major in college before I decided journalism was a more stable career path—what was I thinking? But I digress. Back to stripping for Meryl).

The play is a satirical beauty pageant in which a cringingly sexist emcee puts three female contestants through three increasingly degrading rounds of pageantry. There’s a round of Q&A (“Contestant Number Two, what do you think it means to be a woman?”), a talent portion (wherein I perform a lip-synch to “Zou Bisou Bisou” á la Mad Men’s Megan Draper), and, finally, an “underpants round,” in which the contestants appear on stage in their underwear and beg the audience to tell them they’re pretty. The curtain comes down on a clothes-less heap of young women.

Tuesday was opening night. We pulled on our tacky pageant dresses and applied our gaudy make-up in a makeshift dressing room in the tiny, one-room theater. We were hardly nervous—the theater only seated 40 people, and from the sounds of applause we heard from backstage, it was clear that the audience was only a quarter full.

The musical stylings of the “POT LEDOM” song from America’s Next Top Model cued our grand entrance. We strutted onstage in our ill-fitting, flashy gowns. We cranked out our ridiculous poses. We pursed our lips in the most glorious of duck-faces. We stared out at the audience.

I saw Mamie Gummer first, in the center of the second row. My knees wobbled in my already unsteady heels. Through the haze of the stage lights I could see there was an older, blond woman next to her—a stealthy glance leftward confirmed my prediction. It was Meryl Streep—brilliant, beautiful, Oscar winning, incomparable Meryl Streep. She was ten feet away from me. She was smiling. But seriously, you guys—Meryl Streep!

A fantasy flashed before my eyes wherein Meryl—I consider us to be on first-name basis now—would approach me after the show and tell me I was just perfect for her next Hollywood blockbuster project. Then she would whisk me away to a red carpet somewhere and I’d become super famous and next thing I’d know, I’d be thanking her in my Academy Award acceptance speech. Jordyn, I told myself, this needs to be the greatest performance of your life.

Of course, it wasn’t. My nerves made me stumble over the lines in my opening monologue. Brittany threw a prop off-stage and knocked over a pile of stepping stools. Victoria tripped over Brittany’s gown and fell; her leg was bleeding for the rest of the play. But despite the setbacks, we were putting on a half-decent performance: My girl Meryl was relaxed in her chair and laughing out loud.

To top things off, the play ended with the underpants round. It’s hard enough being nearly naked in front of an audience of strangers; I had to be nearly naked in front of a goddess. But If I died tomorrow, I’d be happy knowing that at least I’d sung a song to Meryl Streep wearing nothing but my bra and panties.

“I loved, loved, loved the girl play,” Meryl Streep told us after the play. We all drooled. “It’s true. It’s so fucking true.”

Then she gave us a thumbs-up, winked, and disappeared around the corner. Our mouths were agape. Our lives were made. I think Hanah almost cried. I vowed never to change my underwear again.

Olivier Nakache, Meryl Streep, Omar Sy, Eric Toledano and Mr. Weinstein.

As we walked out of Cipriani 55 on Wednesday, we were overwhelmed with confusion. What had just happened? Smiling, we headed for a cab, trying to piece together some sort of cohesion.

“We are getting people out of wheelchairs and walking," I recalled  Matthew Reeve saying at the beginning of the evening, poised on the red carpet of the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation annual Magical Evening. 'That involves fundraising.”

“Its a wonderful chance to celebrate what the organization has accomplished and remind everyone what needs to be done, whilst remembering my father and step mother’s legacy.”

With the evening's noble purpose clearly set in our minds, we were ushered to our tables.

Good Morning America anchors Josh Elliot, Sam Champion and Lara Spencer kicked off the proceedings with a champagne toast. The taste of bubbly fresh on our lips, the presentation of the Christopher Reeve Spirit and Courage award soon followed.  We were inspired by James Dasavano's struggle to reverse his mother’s paralysis, a fete he accomplished with the help of his family and the foundation. Tears almost came to our eyes when we saw his mother walk beside him to the podium.

A little break in the ceremonies gave us time to gather our emotions and tuck into the starter and eyebrow-raising pop performance by Jason Derulo. “I suffered a broken neck when performing a routine back flip tuck preparing for my tour this year. When I heard that they reached out to me I said, 'absolutely.' I had to move a couple things around but I felt like nothing else was more important than this,”  Mr. Derulo told us, honored to participate in the evening.

After dinner we headed over to have a chat with masochistic magician David Blaine. When we got nearer we realized that he was eating glass to the audience of Meryl Streep and Harvey Weinstein. The night was careening into chaos. After Ms. Streep ran away in disgust we asked Mr. Blaine how he came to be involved in the organization.

“Want to see a trick?” he asked.

Please no, not the glass. Mercifully he pulled out a pack of cards and proceeded to perform a whirlwind of card tricks. “You can’t tell anyone about these tricks because they are going to go in my new show," he said as he pulled a folded four of spades from underneath my watch.

We suddenly heard Ms. Streep at the podium, poised beside Mr. Weinstein, the two having escaped Mr. Blaine to present an award to Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano, the directors of the French box office hit The Intouchables. Ms. Streep almost gave the dagger shaped award to the producer Mr. Weinstein.

“Do I give to you now ... between the eyes?”

Do it Meryl. She didn’t and after a slightly unbelievable story about how he and Johnny Depp were the reason the handicap access bill was passed in the Senate, Mr. Weinstein handed off the award. Omar Sy, the lead in The Intouchables, gave an extremely moving speech which was soon followed by some more pop mayhem in the form of Mr. Derulo’s girlfriend Jordin Sparks. Earlier she had told us that “anytime I can be at a place where people are trying to make a difference or trying to change things I feel super. Christopher Reeve and Dana Reeve are Superman and Superwomen so that is quite fitting.”

Her songs following us, The Observer headed for the door. Before we could exit, however, we were stopped by a camera crew for yet another Jersey reality show as they filmed what appeared to be two very tiny orange people. At that point nothing could surprise us.

Meryl Streep (Getty Images)

Three-time Academy Award winner Meryl Streep announced last night her donation of $1 million to the Public Theater, the company at which she got an early start on the New York stage. "I give this gift in honor of the founder of The Public Theater, my friend and mentor Joseph Papp, and in remembrance of one of the theater's Board members and greatest supporters, my friend Nora Ephron," Ms. Streep announced.

This summer, Ms. Streep took part in the 50th anniversary of the Public Theater by playing Juliet in a Shakespeare in the Park production of Romeo and Juliet. The company, which organizes the summertime performances outdoors, is set to unveil to the public the $40 million renovation of its Astor Place home with an open house on October 13.

Lee Jones and Streep in Hope Springs. (Columbia Pictures)

In an age of idiotic garbage overpopulated with alternate realities and toxic avengers in Halloween costumes, I cannot tell you how touching, restorative and vitamin-enriching it is to see a gentle, tender and intelligent film with A-list stars playing real people dealing with real problems in the everyday world. Instead of stupid gags and punchlines, Hope Springs is a character study in elegiac pastels about how people love, then change and eventually drift away from each other—and the daunting energy it takes for them to get their old mojo back while the apple still bites. Separately, Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones are national treasures, but together they are simultaneously spectacular and intimately awe-inspiring. I have never loved either one more.

They play Kay and Arnold, a middle-class couple from Omaha, wed for 31 years in a union once ignited with spark plugs, now reduced through the curdled habit of uninspired routine to a stale marriage that needs a new transmission. Their two kids are grown and independent; they sleep in different rooms, Arnold spends so much time on the golf course and watching TV sports replays that Kay sighs, “It’s like being married to ESPN.” Her life makes a two-hour bonus episode of Desperate Housewives look like 10 minutes of aerobics. Hard work in the kitchen produces meals consumed quietly by Arnold with nothing more than a grunt before he retires to the den to watch TV before bed. If she dons a frilly nightgown and slips seductively into his bedroom aroused with high expectations, he looks up from his golf magazine and asks “What?” They haven’t had sex since Dr. Phil was born. The big excitement is a subscription to one of those new digital cable deals with all of those extra channels and still nothing worth watching. After three decades of boredom, Kay is, to put it mildly, underappreciated—like Meryl Streep without a fake nose or a foreign accent.

“You marry who you marry—you are who you are—it doesn’t change,” says her friend (Jean Smart) but Kay is tired of constant rejection and terminal ennui. One day at the mall, she dons her reading glasses, browses the “How To” shelves at Barnes and Noble, and buys a book called You Can Have the Marriage You Want, by a relationship expert named Dr. Bernard Feld, who runs a camp for intensive couples counseling in Hope Springs, Maine. Optimistic, she withdraws money from her personal savings, plunks down $4,000 on the Internet, and signs up for a week of therapy. Arnold is so appalled by the cost that he refuses to go, but when the morning of departure arrives and he watches her heading for the airport with her suitcase packed, he relents and grudgingly follows. The rest of the movie shows, carefully and without contrivance, what happens when two decent people risk humiliation and pain to explore their inner feelings long enough to redeem what they’ve sacrificed through age and tedium. She wants to restore lost intimacy to her marriage. He just wants to get his money back and go home. Charm eludes him. Challenged and annoyed by even the price of tuna in a local homespun country café, Arnold is the kind of curmudgeon who has seen entirely too many Woody Allen movies, but as the memories come out in his counseling sessions, his sweetness emerges. (When they fell in love in college, he hid her engagement ring in a cinnamon bun.) Learning to touch again, his awkwardness is slow and tender-hearted and her joy is fragile but palpable.

The pristine beauty and pastoral ambience of the charming coastal Maine village of Hope Springs (played by the whitewashed colonialism of Stonington, Conn.) is a cure for anything that ails you, and by the time Kay and Arnold reach the next step in their homework assignments—to explore their sexual history—the setting has become a relaxing contrast to the embarrassing facts they uncover about orgasms, fantasies and erectile dysfunction. “I was never comfortable with oral sex,” Kay tells Dr. Feld (Steve Carell, underplaying with moderation and compassion). “With giving or receiving?” he counters. The expression on Meryl Streep’s face when she looks astounded and asks, “Huh?” has got to be seen to be enjoyed to the max. Trying at last to revive the horny days of youth, Arnold orchestrates an evening in an elegant colonial inn with champagne and chocolate-dipped strawberries that turns poignant when lovemaking wears thin, like an old quilt. Nothing is hackneyed and everything is unpredictable in the assured direction by David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada) and the intelligent screenplay by Vanessa Taylor, making her feature film debut after writing and producing such above-average TV shows as Game of Thrones and Everwood. The camerawork is clean and captivating without a lot of visual wows, allowing the actors plenty of room to relate in a completely natural style.

They know what they’re doing, but there is no question Hope Springs would not be the revelation it is without two stars of impeccable magnitude. Meryl Streep is her usual reliable self—alert, committed, analytical, making every minute count. But it is really Tommy Lee Jones who surprises and thrills, matching his co-star moment by moment, scene by scene. I’ve never seen him so truly involved. Even in the gruff cactus and sage sagas set in his native Texas, he is never less than mesmerizing. But he seems genuinely inspired partnering an artist with real craft. With exasperated groans, hunched shoulders and graying hair, his Arnold is impatient and irritating, but sensitive and manly, with a total grasp of the nuances of comedy. Amazingly, he looks furtively through the corners of his eyes with a poker face, like a kid caught with his finger in the cherry pie before it reaches the table, and I dare you not to laugh out loud. He hasn’t had a role like this in years, and he is thoroughly flawless.

Without giving anything away, Hope Springs ends with a coda that arrives too abruptly and resolves its loose ends a bit too neatly, but that doesn’t dilute the impact. I think everything about the movie is too subtle and real to appeal to the Batman demographic, but for mature audiences who have forgotten how to smile, it takes up where The Best
Exotic Marigold Hotel left off.

rreed@observer.com

HOPE SPRINGS

Running Time 100 minutes

Written by Vanessa Taylor

Directed by David Frankel

Starring Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones and Steve Carell

3.5/4

Al Pacino

“We have a Shakespearean, Elizabethean temper,” Al Pacino informed a seated crowd Monday evening in Central Park. As part of its 50th Anniversary Gala, the Public Theater was honoring Mr. Pacino with an award, in the form of a prop rapier he had once wielded on stage, “I’m a little nervous,” he laughed. “I wish I had water, but I have a sword,”

While the audience of hundreds listened to Mr. Pacino with rapt attention, a secondary scrum gathered across the fence. What appeared to be backup pitchers on a hapless softball team abandoned their game to listen to the famed thespian. Soon, a quintessentially New York amalgam of dog-walkers, skateboarders and bright-eyed Broadway hopefuls paused their iPods, essaying to hear Mr. Pacino over the Central Park din.

Earlier, as guests arrived, many seemed to materialize suddenly from the Where’s Waldo-esque ether of the park. From the throngs of sunglassed and unknowing denizens, Julianna Margulies and husband Keith Lieberthal appeared, followed by Chelsea Clinton and Mac Mezvinsky, Kathleen Turner, Julia Stiles and Lily Rabe.

The red carpet, positioned on the West side of the theater, was situated atop a blind hill. With clipboard in hand, one unlucky PR staffer was tasked with running up and down the escarpment, alerting her superiors when the VIPS arrived—the Public’s own Paul Revere. (Listen, dear readers, and you will hear, her stage-whispering celebrity arrivals from far and near!)

Returning to the Delacorte theater was a sort of homecoming for Ms. Rabe, who acted alongside Mr. Pacino last year in The Merchant of Venice. “Working with Al Pacino was one of the great privileges of my life,” she told The Observer. “He’s a wonderful human being, and being able to spend a year of my life, a very complicated year of my life, with him through all of that was something that I’m very grateful for.”

She insisted she wasn’t nervous when she first met the actor, however, and made no special preparations for the occasion. “I didn’t do anything. I probably, I don’t know, I rolled out of bed and took a shower,” she laughed. (Such élan!) While meeting her idols does not make her ill at ease, other things certainly do: “You know, snakes. Snakes not for me. People, more for me.”

As Ms. Rabe headed toward dinner, Steve Martin appeared wearing a fedora. He rushed towards his seat, and declined to be interviewed, with an unconvincing half-apology. “But I like The Observer!” he called over his shoulder, “It’s a great paper!” God bless you Mr. Martin! Don’t worry, we’ll talk next time.

Bob Balaban, however, proved perfectly chatty when asked which of the Bard’s characters he most identifies with. “Easily Caliban, because no other Shakespearean character is almost my name. It’s the only one!” he exclaimed gaily. “What could it be, Richard III? No. That doesn’t sound like Balaban.” The actor went on to describe his busy summer, which includes a book tour for his upcoming title The Creature from the Seventh Grade. “Its completely autobiographical,” he said. “But in this case the boy turns into an eight and a half foot reptile, which I didn’t do.” Describing himself as “shortest, skinniest, most-incompetent boy in his class,” Mr. Balaban professed that he has “fabulously good and fabulously horrifying memories of the seventh grade.”

At dinner on the Delacorte’s northeasterly lawn, guests toasted the Public’s half-century of free plays. White lanterns bobbled in the slight breeze as Christine Quinn saluted the organization.

As the main course was being served, Tony Kushner shared his favorite Shakespearean play. “For various reasons, Midsummer, because I think its about theater itself. So it seems like to me it’s sort of at the center of things.” Sadly, we didn’t have the opportunity to press him further, as we were overwhelmed by hundreds of passing chicken breasts.

After the meal, the crowds sought their seats for the evening’s reading of Romeo and Juliet. Attempting to avoid the clogged corridors, full of chatting and meandering guests, many attendees hoofed it across the lawn, only to find they had to mount a thigh-high fence to access the stage. Revelers young and old, spry and not so spry, heaved legs over the railing in an show of theatric acrobatics. Several sets of unmentionables were unwittingly flashed.

Before finding our seat, we ran into Cynthia Nixon, whose fire-red hair is growing back after her stint as a cancer-stricken professor in the Broadway show Wit. The actress, however, doesn’t know if she will keep her tresses short. “People keep asking me that. I’m getting a lot of positive reinforcement about the length,” she said, pulling at the still downy strands.

Inside the theater, guests rose for a standing ovation as the cast took the stage. Meryl Streep larked a lighthearted vision of Juliet, while Kevin Kline read opposite, as Romeo. Christopher Walken earned the most laughs as a sometimes Queens-inflected Mercutio, and Christine Baranski appeared as the nurse. Throughout the reading, flashing, fluorescent underbellies of passing planes reminded viewers they were sitting beneath the midsummer Manhattan sky.

After the performance, we found Ethan Hawke. Asked what he would ask Shakespeare if he had one question, Mr. Hawke thought for several moments, before offering a response. “What happens when we die?” he concluded. Genius or cheeky (or both), we have not yet decided. We’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.

After the reading, guests returned to the Delacorte’s front lawn, and enjoyed dancing, desserts and drinks. “Can I get champagne and wine? Is that bad?” one guest asked her friend guiltily.

The clock neared midnight. The softball team had long since packed its bats (after yet another loss, it seemed), and the Great Lawn was quiet once more. The party at the Delacorte continued, however. With glasses in hand guests danced into night, ill-chosen spike heels sinking into the new summer sod.

editorial@observer.com

Kevin Kline and Meryl Streep (Getty Images)

In honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park festival at the Delacorte Theater, Kevin Kline and Meryl Streep are going to play parts we would have thought they might have aged out of--Romeo and Juliet. Hey, if there's anyone whom we're told, over and over, can play any role, it's Ms. Streep! The pair, who made (the somehow underrated!) Sophie's Choice and the recent Prairie Home Companion together, are to be joined by the likes of Raul Esparza, Jesse L. Martin, Sam Waterston, and Christopher Walken onstage. Eighties-movies junkies--or those who want to see Meryl Streep surmount the ultimate acting challenge--will have to be rather lucky to get a seat; the performance is for one night only on June 18. (Tickets start at $1,500!)

Plummer with his contemporary.

As we were otherwise unoccupied on Sunday night, we turned on the television to watch the 84th Academy Awards. “You’re only two years older than me,” Christopher Plummer crooned to his newly acquired gold statue, “Where have you been all my life?” Mr. Plummer won Best Supporting Actor for his role in The Beginners, giving him the distinction of being the oldest actor to ever win an Oscar. But by the end of the telecast, we’d all aged at least a couple of decades, as did Billy Crystal, who seemed to have peeked inside the Ark of the Covenant right before the broadcast.

The whole night was full of non-surprises. Meryl Streep won. The Artist won. And while Martin Scorsese didn’t exactly win for Hugo, the sound editing was really, really good! Robert Downey, Jr. pretended he was making a documentary about himself, which would have been more amusing had he actually been making a documentary about himself, and Angelina Jolie’s right leg made a special cameo, as did Jennifer Lopez’s nipple, if the Internet is to be believed. (And when is it not?) Before the end of the telecast, Ms. Jolie’s leg had its own Twitter feed. Sample tweets: “Look at me!” “I’m over here!!!!” “Look at meeee!!” If nothing else, it beautifully captures that very special strain of Hollywood narcissism, which can only be described as “MEEEEEE!!!!!!”

Octavia Davis, who may have been the only person involved immune to the dreaded MEEEEEE virus, gave the night’s most moving speech and looked radiant in Tadashi Shoji, while Ms. Streep effectively summarized the entire evening in her speech with, “But … whatever.” Woody Allen won for the first time since Hannah and Her Sisters, and didn’t show up, as always. We were expected to be impressed when Cirque du Soleil did a short “History in Cinema” aerobatic routine, but were dampened by the sight of Mr. Clooney rolling his eyes in the front row. To get his attention these days you can’t be a French-Canadian acrobat or an Italian model. He’s moved on to American wrestlers, which seems like a natural evolutionary sequence of sorts; we’re just not sure in which direction.

And as Mr. Crystal attempted to joke, “nothing can take the sting out of economic problems like watching millionaires collecting gold statues.” And nothing can take the entertainment out of the entertainment industry like doing the same.

Streep (Getty Images)

Last night's Oscars were as draggy as ever--perhaps it's time to give up the ghost of the hope that they can magically become a breezy ceremony, or at least to stop complaining annually that the jokes are hackneyed and the show's self-congratulatory. The jokes being hackneyed are kind of the point, and, given that this is a Hollywood trade show, the self-congratulation is REALLY the point. And the tributes would not have been so terrifically vague had they been able to be directed at nominated films people had seen--the Bridesmaids-a-palooza in the middle of the show should serve as a reminder of what the tributes at the Oscars look like when they're aimed at hit movies from this year and not "hit movies from all time."

The show's biggest surprise came late in the evening, when Meryl Streep beat out supposed front-runner Viola Davis for the Best Actress trophy; for those hoping for an epochal Oscar moment, it was both disappointing (Ms. Davis would have been only the second ever black Best Actress) and vivifying (Ms. Streep's Oscar was her third--and her first since 1983). The rest of the ceremony went according to plan, with top nominees The Artist and Hugo both winning five awards, the former in major categories and the latter in minor ones.

What else sticks out the morning after? Emma Stone's eagerness to take from Anne Hathaway the mantle of "the one eager to sing and dance" after it didn't quite work out for Ms. Hathaway. Chris Rock nailing sixty seconds of standup and, yes, fine, whatever, the same old Billy Crystal jokes Mom and Dad like. (We will say we've never gotten the "What the nominees are thinking" thing, but people apparently like it?) The Christopher Guest-directed Wizard of Oz parody, so utterly random it felt like a wonderful mistake. The indication that Tom Cruise has been rehabilitated by Hollywood in that he got to present Best Picture. Perhaps the best moment of last night was the appearance of Melissa Leo, the weird warrior queen of the 2011 Oscars, in a relatively normal sequined dress presenting an Oscar to someone else. Last year, she stole Kirk Douglas's cane--and this year, she just smiled and applauded and watched time march on and another Oscar ceremony enter the books.