What Does that Bird Stand for in The Seagull?

"I don't care about Natalie Portman, I just want to see the play," I said. "Ah, you say that now, Danny boy," said my friend Denise, speaking in an Irish accent, because she is?well?Irish. "Wait till you see her up on the stage."

Denise is a very allusive sort of person, and when she told me she knew a special way of getting tickets, I thought it meant she'd done some housesitting for Mike Nichols. But her special way just meant showing up two hours early and going to the back of a long line of "standby" people?grubby, whiny bag people, elbowing for space; elderly, combative Jews, clinging to the last rent-controlled apartments on the Upper West Side. I had visions of myself slugging it out with some retired schoolteacher: "Give me my free tickets! I want Streep! Streep!"

Was it Streep? Hoffman? Portman? Philip Michael Thomas? Philip Seymour Hirsch? People have been lining up at 5 a.m. to see this damned thing. I interviewed a few people who had shown up early to find out what was going on.

"I went to see Madonna last night, and right now, if you gave me a choice between this and Madonna, I'd pick this, because Madonna only played her new stuff," said a woman of about 30 with blue-tinted eyelashes. Her mother had waited in line to get tickets for them.

Sweet young blonde people with crosses around their necks said they adored Philip Hoffman Hoffman. One of the sweet young blonde people said "the politics of the line" was "amazing." His sister giggled and said that one angry person who felt she'd been budged said, "You've been fabricating all day." But there was no yelling.

Denise and I were among the very last people to be let in. And as a result, we got the tickets they were least inclined to give away. For whom had they been intended? Bill and Hillary? Nathan Lane and Tina Brown?

I don't know, but I say Natalie Portman is tiny, and has an egg-shaped head.

I just called Denise, and she will only go on record saying that Portman is a lovely woman who has good posture. I have no reason to be kind to Portman, but I do think she is a passable actress, which is not something I find myself saying about many actresses.

Certainly I don't find myself saying that about Marcia Gay Hardon. I hadn't quite placed her until Denise reminded me that I'd watched her win an Academy Award on tv and moaned when they played that clip from Pollock: "You need, you need, you need, you need!"

It was great fun, though, under the night sky in the park, and Streep was actually very good. Mike Nichols' casting decisions were ingenious: he got the guy who played the once-handsome Doctor Astrov in Vanya on 42nd Street to play the once-handsome Doctor Dorn here. And Hoffman von Hoffman: you loved him as the sensitive young writer in Mamet's State and Main, you'll love him as the sensitive young writer in the Seagull.

Just because I am a smartass, I showed up a couple of days later and asked people what the seagull symbolizes. A very formally dressed white man in a blue suit was escorting a frail young Asian woman who was hidden behind big black sunglasses, a big black hat and big black hair. He told me he'd got tickets by paying $100 to a scalper, and then he rushed away.

"What does the seagull symbolize?" I called after him.

"Money," he said, and the woman let out a "Ha!"

A bright young law-student-type took the question very seriously?a chance to impress his girlfriend.

"No no, a seagull gets shot early in the play and then the young girl is compared to a seagull later, when the writer seduces her just for his pleasure." He had been in a hurry to get to the theater, but he stopped so abruptly to answer my question that a rollerblader was thrown off course and sent crashing into the pavement.