According to Deadline, Meryl Streep is set to star in Places, Please, a film drama that will be directed by Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner Michael Cristofer from a script by UCLA MFA alum Elisabeth Seldes Annacone (The Changing Room). The film is a love letter to Broadway, where both Streep and Cristofer started their careers. In an interview here, they describe their start together on a Broadway performance of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, which figures in the film. Their comments on the stage, and how Broadway can reemerge from its pandemic plight, are included below. Places, Please will shoot this summer in New York, and will be introduced to buyers for the virtual Berlin Market, with CAA Media Finance repping domestic distribution rights and Filmnation handling international sales. Streep, Steven Rogers (I, Tonya) and Jane Rosenthal (The Irishman) will produce. Berry Welsh will executive produce. In the film, Streep will play 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 aging, 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. In explaining the genesis of the film, Cristofer and Streep explain its tie to the launch of each of their stars, and how their sympathy for the unprecedented hardship facing the live theater industry in the pandemic gave this film urgency.