Lincoln Center right now is a confusing mess of plywood barriers, but the Film Society’s Gala Tribute to Meryl Streep at Avery Fisher Hall last night was touched with genius. Despite trumpeters playing voluntaries behind a white Mercedes parked in the main lobby, it was an event about something. And even if the audience was a wild mixture of frizzy Upper West Side types, hedge-fund wives in strapless red, crashers begging stars for extra tickets and deposed tycoons looking defiantly cheery, they reacted as a single organism to the clips and comments that culminated in Meryl Streep’s final, extraordinary speech.

Mike Nichols quoted W.H. Auden: “Art is clear thinking about mixed feelings.” The film clips, chosen by the Film Society’s Wendy Keys, showed the infinite number of feelings a human face can convey, from the socialite’s cold bitchery in “Julia,” to the tragic agony of Sophie having to choose between her children in “Sophie’s Choice” — a choice culminating in a silent scream that has never been equaled on film. On through to the sexy seductress of “Joe Tynan” to the mystery of Isak Dinesen in “Out of Africa,” to the comic discomfiture of the matronly shrink in “Prime” who has to listen to her patient describe hot sex with a man who is none other than the shrink’s son.

On the screen we saw different women of differing specific weight and gravity and tone; on stage, we saw Robert Redford extolling her craft and adding, “Part of her is really out to lunch. How can she smile? Doesn’t she know she’s an actor? Actors know the other shoe can drop at any time! And then you realize … she knows something you don’t know.”

Mike Nichols, having quoted Auden, described the secret to the depth of Meryl Streep’s multiple roles as being something akin to: “You pack your own bag — and no one has to know what’s inside it.” He quoted the speech she gave when she won the Emmy Award for her multiple parts in HBO’s “Angels in America”: “Sometimes I think I’m overrated, but not tonight.”

Robert De Niro, who almost never speaks in public, read, charmingly and with great timing, from cards. Stanley Tucci, who is about to play her husband when she plays Julia Child in Nora Ephron’s “Julie and Julia,” revealed, “I have cooked with her, and she can’t time a meal.”

But then Meryl Streep came out, and you understood that the only thing that allows one person to be so many others is if they are truly themselves.

She came out in a taffeta shirtwaist dress and red high heels and declared: “I was totally dreading this for so many reasons — the dress, the speech, seating the relatives with the stars — so many minefields!!”