Meryl Streep to star in 'Places, Please' with Michael Cristofer as director

Three times Academy Award-winner Meryl Streep will star in Places, Please. It is a drama film that will be directed by Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize Winner, Michael Cristofer. The movie is described as a love letter to Broadway, where the actor and director started their careers.

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Meryl Streep, Michael Cristofer team-up for Places, Please, a Homage to Broadway

According to a report in Deadline, the script will be penned by UCLA MFA alum Elisabeth Seldes Annacone (The Changing Room). Places, Please will commence shooting in June 2021 in New York, and will be introduced to buyers for the virtual Berlin Market. CAA Media Finance will have domestic distribution rights and Filmnation is handling international sales. Meryl Streep, Steve Rogers (I, Tonya), and Jane Rosenthal (The Irishman) will produce the film while Berry Welsh will serve as executive producer.

The official synopsis of the films reads: Places, Please has Meryl Streep as Lillian Hall, an actress who is synonymous with Broadway. Throughout her long, illustrious career, she has never missed a performance—not for her daughter, not for illness, not for any reason. Yet in the rehearsals leading to her next Broadway production, her confidence is challenged. People and events conspire to take away her ability to do what she loves most. Suddenly, Hall is forced to reckon with the past and the price she has paid for the choices she made in her life and her art. Can she repair a lifetime of parental neglect? Can she reconcile herself to the demands of ageing, its real and perceptual debilities? Can she navigate the shoals of self-doubt and loss, the betrayals of others and of her own body? Will she go down in the record books in a blaze of glory? Not without a fight.

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Meryl Streep and Michael Cristofer began their career together with a Broadway performance of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. Talking about the project Michael Cristofer said that "curiously" in the story of the film, there is an actress who is struggling to open a production of a play that happens to be The Cherry Orchard by Chekhov. He mentioned that in 1977, he and Meryl Streep were both in a production of that play on Broadway, so as he was working on the script, and kept thinking that he should just send the script to the actor. Cristofer thought that she will be too busy and have something else to do. But he sent it anyway.

Meryl Streep asserted that she loved the script and thought about that production of The Cherry Orchard. She explained that it was at the Vivian Beaumont and it starred "the great" Irene Worth. The actor mentioned that for her, that production was a "real jumping-off" point. They had a blackout in New York, famously, and it happened during the play. The audience was sitting there, all prepped. And they brought out candles and put them on the footlights. Robert De Niro was in the audience that night, and he saw her in it, and he cast her in The Deer Hunter. Streep said that she went from there, and abandoned the theatre, for a lot of different reasons. "Mostly, for having a lot of children," she noted. 

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