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That was my first reaction on hearing that Laurie Metcalf would be playing the blowzy, lusty hostess from hell, Martha, in Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” on Broadway this spring. My second reaction was that I should know better by now.
After all, I had felt the same way eight years ago when I read that Metcalf was appearing as Mary Tyrone, the genteel, morphine-addled mother in a London revival of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” I again raised a skeptical eyebrow when I learned that Metcalf had been cast as Ibsen heroine Nora Helmer (in Lucas Hnath’s “A Doll’s House, Part 2”) and, a year later, as the embittered middle-aged matron in Albee’s “Three Tall Women.”
And how likely was it that Metcalf would be convincing as Hillary Clinton in Hnath’s “Hillary and Clinton,” seen on Broadway last year?
Well, Metcalf has a clutch of rave reviews and two Tonys to wave as evidence against my cynical prognostications. But more important, from my perspective, each of those performances made me think about a familiar, outsized character (and, yes, I put Hillary Clinton in that category) in ways I never had before.
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At 64, Metcalf has improbably become the leading claimant to a mantle once worn by the likes of Helen Hayes and Julie Harris: first lady of the American stage. (Metcalf has the theater career that Meryl Streep might have had, had she not abandoned Broadway for Hollywood.) Such an exalted position may surprise those who still think of Metcalf principally as the romantically challenged Jackie Harris, from the long-running sitcom “Roseanne.”
And no matter what wigs, makeup or period costumes she puts on, the Laurie Metcalf who shows up with increasing regularity on New York’s stages still looks like Jackie from “Roseanne” — long-faced, reedy and, at first glance, so self-effacing you expect her to be upstaged by the scenery.
She certainly doesn’t exude the theatrical glamour of a marquee name whose every entrance is an Event. Nor is she the kind of chameleon who changes accents, noses, voices and body types for each new part. Yet she has wound up seeming pretty much perfect for almost every major stage role she has taken on.
That’s not so much because Metcalf turns into characters who would appear to be nothing like her. It’s that those characters somehow turn into her. In each instance, the now familiar form that we know as Laurie Metcalf becomes an open window onto the singular workings of an individual heart and mind.
This makes the people she plays remarkably easy to identify with. If Metcalf can establish with such clarity — and so little camouflage — what she has in common with souls as disparate as Mary Tyrone, Nora Helmer and (gulp!) Hillary Clinton, then we too should be able to make that connection with our own ordinary selves.
Most of the Mary Tyrones I’ve seen, for example, have been embodied by celebrated beauties of lofty dramatic stature (Vanessa Redgrave, Claire Bloom, Jessica Lange). Each lent a mythic glow to a mother fading into memories of an idealized past.
When Metcalf took on that part, opposite David Suchet in Anthony Page’s West End revival, she was flat-voiced, fast-talking, blank-eyed and utterly out of sync with the male actors who surrounded her. She seemed to come from another planet. That alien quality was jarring until I realized that this planet was the world of addiction, a place that isolates and insulates its victims from the demands of others.
Metcalf gave Mary’s thoughts a self-contained circularity that left the character’s family out in the cold, while paradoxically inviting the audience inside to see and feel exactly how this woman functioned, and why. It was a contemporary performance that nonetheless fit beautifully into a venerable play. And when, five years later, Hnath came up with a drolly self-conscious sequel to “A Doll’s House,” Metcalf turned out to be the ideal bridge between the Ibsen heroine of then and now.
It’s worth remembering that Metcalf began her professional life in the trenches of gritty ensemble theater. Long before she became a multiple Emmy winner for “Roseanne” — and an Oscar nominee as the caustic but empathic mother in Greta Gerwig’s “Lady Bird” — she was a founding member of the Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago, when it was formed in the mid-1970s.
That troupe — whose original ensemble also included future stars John Malkovich and Gary Sinise — was noted for its commitment to emotionally raw performance. When the company traveled to New York in 1984, for an off-Broadway revival of Lanford Wilson’s “Balm in Gilead,” the 28-year-old Metcalf was in the cast and won an Obie Award for playing a terminally naïve young prostitute.
Her 20-minute monologue in the play’s second act had critics in ecstasy, and it is still recalled with misty-eyed reverence by those who saw it. Still, that was a case of a vibrant young actress embodying emotionally naked youth. Not such a stretch, right? — and usually not the kind of performance that presages a midlife hot streak as a homegrown equivalent of fabled European stage stars like Sarah Bernhardt and Eleanora Duse.
Yet during the past decade, Metcalf has been nailing role after role in the modern canon of Important Parts like no other American actress of her generation. (She’s already scheduled to play the ever-supportive Linda Loman — the antithesis of Albee’s Martha — opposite Nathan Lane in “Death of a Salesman.”) The only time she felt truly miscast to me was when she played the psychopathic fan of a novelist in “Misery,” a Broadway adaptation of the Stephen King thriller, with Bruce Willis playing injured captive to Metcalf’s demented former nurse.
It wasn’t that Metcalf wasn’t good in the part, exactly. (She received yet another Tony nomination for it.) But she was too vulnerable, too open, too understandable to ever be scary, at least as the play asked her to be. The one thing that Metcalf can’t do, it seems, is opaque monsters. Whenever she appears onstage, it’s impossible not to feel that Laurie Metcalf is us.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times .