Laurie Metcalf’s Third Act

Somewhere in the bowels of Lincoln Center, Laurie Metcalf was in a rehearsal room, quietly conferring with the director Joe Mantello. It was February, days before the new Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” would move into the Winter Garden Theatre. Four weeks into rehearsals, the cast—led by Nathan Lane, as the delusional, doomed salesman Willy Loman—was still refining the Loman family’s implosion. Metcalf, playing Willy’s enabling wife, Linda, had read the play in high school but had purposefully avoided ever seeing a production. “I thought maybe down the line I’d be able to play the part, so I didn’t want somebody’s performance in my head,” she explained. The same went for Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and Mary Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”—characters that Metcalf had tackled in the past decade and a half. “I stayed away from bucket-list-type roles, just in case,” she said, then let out a hearty laugh. “And now, in my dotage—here they come!”

Metcalf’s turn as a Broadway eminence was far from assured. Since the nineteen-eighties, TV audiences have known her as the rootless, rubbery Aunt Jackie, from the sitcom “Roseanne.” The more stage-savvy know her as a charter member of Steppenwolf Theatre Company, the red-blooded Chicago troupe that emerged in the seventies and launched such talents as John Malkovich, Gary Sinise, and Joan Allen. In 2017 and 2018, Metcalf won back-to-back Tony Awards, for Lucas Hnath’s “A Doll’s House, Part 2” and Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women”; she was simultaneously nominated for an Oscar, for her role in Greta Gerwig’s film “Lady Bird.” She was hailed as the new First Lady of American Theatre, a moniker once given to Helen Hayes. In the Times, Ben Brantley wrote that Metcalf had attained the stage career “that Meryl Streep might have had, had she not abandoned Broadway for Hollywood.”

None of this acclamation has imbued Metcalf with grandeur. At seventy, she remains a workhorse. She excels at playing women with hardened exteriors, rough edges, and working-class muscle—salt-of-the-earth people, with extra salt. That is certainly true of her Linda Loman. At Lincoln Center, Metcalf was dressed simply, in jeans and a worn “Three Tall Women” hoodie. (“Her wardrobe is made up of merch from shows she’s done,” Mantello observed.) The cast, which that morning had sat through mandatory harassment training—“So, there’s that,” Metcalf said, flatly—included Christopher Abbott and Ben Ahlers, as Willy and Linda’s deadbeat sons, Biff and Happy. They took their places for a climactic scene in Act II in which Linda berates her sons for their shoddy treatment of their father, who is crawling in the dirt outside, his mind unravelling, planting a garden in the middle of the night. Mantello has done away with the naturalistic kitchen-sink set; in the rehearsal room, a plywood box stood in for a red 1964 Chevy that would dominate the stage. In the scene, Linda tosses aside a bouquet of flowers which her sons have bought to appease her and yells, “Get out of my sight.” Metcalf gave the line a venomous hiss, before raising her voice to a shriek. “I got too hot too fast,” she told Mantello afterward, rescoring Linda’s emotional melody.

The scene was interrupted when one of Lane’s prop seed bags burst, spilling everywhere, and the cast devolved into hysterics. Lane, turning hammy, bellowed, “I’m hoping to have an entire salad come the spring!” Clowning around, Metcalf and Ahlers went into a little bowlegged hop. Then it was back to work. I sat behind a table, next to a man in a brown sweater who watched intently through wire-rimmed glasses. It was the producer Scott Rudin, who, more than anyone, is responsible for Metcalf’s prolific third act. In 2021, amid allegations that he had bullied his staff (abusive tirades, thrown office supplies), Rudin stepped back from his career as a pugnacious Broadway titan with exquisite taste. After a four-year exile, he returned, last fall, with Samuel D. Hunter’s play “Little Bear Ridge Road,” starring Metcalf as a hard-bitten Idaho nurse. By doing “Salesman,” she was doubling down on their partnership, even though Rudin remains a controversial figure in the business.

As they continued the scene, Metcalf experimented with the grace notes of her performance: how much force to give the line “Shake his hand, Willy,” whether to embrace Biff at a conciliatory moment. “As a mother, it’s killing her to have to tell the oldest son to leave and never come back,” she told me after the rehearsal, explaining the hug. “It was just a thought. It’s like carving, chipping away, to uncover the storytelling. What are the odds that I’m going to keep it or lose it? I don’t know.”

Arthur Miller described Linda Loman as “a woman who looked as though she had lived in a house dress all her life.” Metcalf seems more like a woman who was born wearing a sweatshirt, as she was when we met for lunch. She brought her “Salesman” script—a loose pile of hole-punched pages, with notes pencilled in the margins. Linda has traditionally been played as a soft, doting figure blinded by admiration for her husband, in all his busted braggadocio. But Metcalf has stripped the honey from Linda’s denial while giving her an ornery shrewdness, especially when it comes to the family’s finances. Her Linda is like the household C.F.O.: she knows where every penny goes, even as Willy’s earning power has sputtered.

“The thing I remember is her being described as a doormat,” Metcalf said. “I immediately thought of that as a challenge. Does she have to be? And, if she isn’t, what is she? I’m dedicating myself to the opposite of that, because I want the characters I play to be strong. I want them to be funny, and I want them to be mean and mad sometimes. So it starts off with a bunch of what-ifs. What if I don’t ‘tremble with sorrow and joy,’ which is a stage direction?”

“Are you sure the book has a red spine?”

Cartoon by Amy Hwang

Metcalf had disregarded all of Miller’s stage directions, not to mention his punctuation. She’d scribbled question marks at the end of the line “You called him crazy,” because it made more sense to her as a question. Her Linda, far from naïve, is frustrated by what she doesn’t know, including an incident years earlier that drove a wedge between Biff and Willy, when Biff caught his father with a mistress on the road. “The rift is so infuriating to her because she can’t figure it out, and it’s damaging the whole family,” Metcalf said. Without turning Linda into what Roseanne Barr might call a domestic goddess, she was bringing the character up to date. “I didn’t even want to come out carrying the laundry basket,” she said—but the laundry is referenced in the dialogue, so she was stuck with it.

“What Laurie has found is that this woman is not fragile. In fact, she’s formidable,” Mantello told me. “She’s not there to be deferential to Willy. She’s his equal partner, and that all came from Laurie.” The first time Mantello talked to Lane about doing “Salesman” was in the mid-nineties, when they worked on the gay drama “Love! Valour! Compassion!” “I was surprised,” Lane said, “because I was probably wearing an apron and high heels at the time.” Lane approached Metcalf about joining him after seeing her in a 2015 production of Miller’s “All My Sons” in East Hampton. “I knew that she would find this strength and fierce protectiveness toward Willy, and that it wouldn’t be sentimental in any way,” he said.

Metcalf isn’t precious about her process. Mantello, who has directed her on Broadway eight times, said, “She has a Midwestern practicality and no-nonsense approach to the work. Nothing’s fussy. Nothing’s indulgent.” Metcalf told me, “I do a lot of daydreaming in the shower. As soon as I know I’m going to play a part, as I’m learning the lines, I walk down the street talking to myself like a crazy person.” Her technique is rooted in mastery of the text. Once a show is up, she’ll get to the theatre early and run through the entire play by herself.

She loves props, which she’ll occasionally add to a scene. In “Salesman,” Biff invites Willy out to dinner at a steak house. (In her script, she wrote “so fancy” next to the restaurant’s name.) Metcalf decided to deliver the message from Biff to Willy with a slip of paper—hard evidence that her son respects his father after all. Greta Gerwig, who directed Metcalf in “Lady Bird,” as Marion, a hospital worker and the withholding mother of a Sacramento teen, recalled, “I have a specific memory of Laurie having an idea of Marion giving her co-workers gifts for their children all the time—that she is deeply caring and connected but can’t figure out how to reach her own daughter. It wasn’t in the script, but it was such a brilliant and specific flourish that made the character come alive.”

In the new Netflix series “Big Mistakes,” created by Dan Levy and Rachel Sennott, Metcalf plays a high-strung hardware-store owner running for mayor after her elderly mother dies of cancer. “At one point in the hospital scenes, she was saying, ‘Can I have a little Tupperware container of lettuce? I just feel like I would have brought a salad,’ ” Levy, who plays her son, told me. “We were, like, O.K., we get Laurie Metcalf a salad. ‘Do you want it dressed?’ ‘No, I want dry lettuce. It’s funnier.’ ” Around the time Levy thought of casting Metcalf, he saw an old clip from “Roseanne” online: Jackie, informing relatives by phone that her father has died, winds up screaming “Dad’s dead! ” to an aunt who’s hard of hearing. “The timing of that comedy and the aggression of the performance—it was lawless. It was so free,” Levy said. “Big Mistakes” opens with Metcalf’s character hollering at her bedridden mother,“You had an accident. We cleaned ya up.”

Collaborators often praise Metcalf for her “fearlessness” and “lack of vanity,” which is another way of saying that she’s happy being plain or prickly. Her face, lined and unprimped, can deftly reveal a character’s grit or careworn fatigue. John Malkovich, one of her Steppenwolf compatriots, mentioned her willingness to “punish the audience”: “People recognize their own lack of comfort or solace in the world, their own outsiderness, their own vulnerabilities and frailties—and then she can rub them in your face.” The playwright Lucas Hnath worked with her on “A Doll’s House, Part 2,” his ballsy sequel to the Henrik Ibsen classic, and “Hillary and Clinton,” his equally ballsy take on the 2008 Presidential primary, in which Metcalf played the beleaguered senator from New York. Hnath recalled her, as Ibsen’s Nora, manspreading in her period frock. “She’s a 3-D-printer actor. I can say how I want a moment to work, and she does it immediately,” he said, then added, “Has anybody talked about her love of stage vomiting?”

A self-described hermit, Metcalf has a monastic aversion to the trappings of fame. Her house in Los Angeles, which she shares with her dog, Connie, is furnished from Target and IKEA. “I don’t want to own anything that I have to worry about if it gets broken or peed on,” she told me. “I also like my surroundings to be very sparse.” After two marriages and four children, she is an empty nester. “I love being alone,” she said. Despite her four Emmys—three for “Roseanne” and one for a guest role on “Hacks”—awards shows don’t interest her. She usually slips out after her category and watches the rest in pajamas, as she did at the Oscars when she was nominated for “Lady Bird.” “I do like the work, though,” she said. “The other part will come and go—the fame—but I’ll always have the work part. That’s lucky.”

At times, her modesty approaches self-denial. Her oldest daughter, Zoe Perry, who is also an actress (she and Metcalf play the same character at different ages on the sitcoms “Young Sheldon” and “The Big Bang Theory,” respectively), recalled, “I once watched her belabor a decision on whether or not to buy herself a four-dollar comb at a Duane Reade, because she was, like, ‘I just don’t know if I need it right now.’ ” This was after “Roseanne,” when she was primarily doing theatre—but nine seasons on a hit sitcom would keep her rich with residuals. Her daughter pleaded, “Are you out of your mind?” She didn’t get the comb.

Perhaps Metcalf’s one indulgence is an eighty-acre ranch in Idaho that she bought in the nineties, during “Roseanne.” “I was making money for the first time in my life,” she said, “and I thought, Geez, what do people do? Get a summer home?” At one point, she was raising goats and donkeys, and a vet showed her how to do a pregnancy check on her cow. Explaining this to me, she mimed reaching an arm into the unfazed animal and feeling for the fetal calf’s nose.

She also kept sheep, whose wool she learned to spin. One spring morning, I met her at Knitty City, a yarn store on the Upper West Side. She was starting a new knitting project, for her offstage time at “Salesman.” She likes to listen to the play in the wings while doing yoga or studying German, which she took in high school. (One of her goals is to do a play in Germany.) “It’s freezing back there, so I have two sweaters on, a heated blanket, and a German book—there’s a visual for ya!” she said. She likes to knit because “it’s very meditative and uses the senses. You have to get the tension right.”

“I need to make a baby gift,” she told the shop’s owner. (Christopher Abbott, her co-star, is having a baby with Aubrey Plaza.) “It can’t be a very detailed pattern, because I’m sitting backstage during a show.” He led her to a shelf of wool. “That’s crazy cute,” she said, eying a white yarn with flecks of color that looked like confetti. She presented her Knitty City loyalty card and bought four skeins and a pair of knitting needles.

“I know I told you the macaroni salad was gonna be your last job, but I need you to hold half a tomato for a month.”

Cartoon by Michael J. Johnson

Metcalf learned to knit from her grandmother while growing up in Edwardsville, Illinois. “I was very shy,” she recalled, over brunch around the corner. Her father was a comptroller at Southern Illinois University, and her mother was a sometime librarian who mostly stayed home to raise the kids. Metcalf is the oldest of three. I asked what her siblings do now and was surprised to see her eyes fill with tears. When Metcalf was nine, she said, her seven-year-old sister was badly injured in a car accident. She remains in assisted living in their home town, where her brother has stayed to oversee her care. How had the upheaval affected her? “I guess it made me withdraw some, protect myself,” she said, softly. She paused and added, “It probably gave me a lot of walls.” Her voice cracked on the last word, and I thought of all her characters who put up psychic walls. I also wondered whether Metcalf’s frugality had a whiff of survivor’s guilt.

Her life in Edwardsville had only glimmers of performance. As a child, she’d charge her neighbors to watch her rock on a swing set in time to “When the Red, Red Robin (Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along).” When she was a junior in high school, the drama department was doing “Auntie Mame,” and she had a three-line part. “I accidentally got a laugh on a line, which I didn’t intend,” she recalled. “But something about my delivery, in all its innocence, I think, was funny. And then: Boom. Hooked.” She enrolled in Illinois State University, planning to study German and anthropology. “It was when I met kids at college that I realized there was a world out there,” she said. She’d been so sheltered that some of the students spoke in what sounded to her like a foreign accent. They were from Chicago.

During her sophomore year, she acted in a student production of Joe Orton’s “What the Butler Saw.” Terry Kinney, a junior, saw it and thought that she was “otherworldly good,” with the comic chops of Lucille Ball, he recounted. Kinney introduced her to his friends Gary Sinise and Jeff Perry, who had gone to high school together in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park and were staging plays under the name Steppenwolf. The group was about to move into an eighty-eight-seat church-school basement there. “They knew they needed some women,” Metcalf said. That summer, she joined them for an evening of one-acts, appearing with Perry in what she called a “misguided” production of Harold Pinter’s “The Lover.” (“Jeff had a mustache glued on. I learned how to smoke.”) The Steppenwolf guys idolized John Cassavetes and tried to channel the vitality of his films onto the stage. “We wanted the audience to fear that we might spill out on them,” Kinney said. “We were in a tiny little theatre, and the action—especially violence—always got perilously close to the audience.”

“We liked stuff with shock value,” Metcalf recalled. “We never thought twice about doing things that were inappropriate or ugly or controversial. Maybe that couldn’t happen again. We could be that way because we weren’t beholden to anybody, let alone somebody’s money.” Steppenwolf’s ethos was based on the ensemble; no one was the star, and the actors would prod one another to greatness. “We were trying to entertain each other, trying to peacock for each other,” she said. Metcalf earned the nickname Mechano, because she had the quickness of “a stenographic machine,” Perry said. He marvelled at her range, which ran from “unadorned dramatic work” to “Tom-and-Jerry buffoonery.”

It was raw, do-it-yourself theatre. “Somebody had to clean the bathroom. Somebody had to take the tickets, which were three dollars,” Metcalf remembered. “We went to the thrift store, made our own costumes. I still have that urge to this day—‘Oh, I have a toaster at home! I can just bring it in!’ ” Working a secretarial job at Chicago’s St. Nicholas Theatre, she swiped its mailing list so that Steppenwolf could target its subscribers. Steppenwolf’s self-imposed isolation from Hollywood and New York made it an incubator where the actors could develop their own style: muscular, contemporary, risky. It also enabled a certain incestuousness; Metcalf dated Kinney, then Malkovich, then Perry. “Honest to God, we didn’t know anybody else,” she said.

After graduating from college with a theatre degree, in 1976, Metcalf remained with Steppenwolf, which was gaining a reputation as a theatrical answer to rock and roll. In 1979, the group staged Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie,” its final play in the basement before moving to Chicago. Their production drew from Williams’s biography. Malkovich played Tom, the playwright’s stand-in, as a closeted gay man. Metcalf rendered his sister, Laura, less as a shut-in with a limp than as a psychologically impaired young woman who, like Williams’s real-life sister, would wind up lobotomized. She cut her hair into awkward bangs and “tried to play a shyness that was uncomfortable to other people,” she said. Malkovich recalled, “I couldn’t really watch her scenes. They were too sad.” The production brought Steppenwolf attention, and Metcalf won Chicago’s prestigious theatre award, the Jeff.

Inevitably, Hollywood started poaching the young actors. Malkovich booked the film “The Killing Fields” after he and Sinise starred in Steppenwolf’s breakout production of “True West.” In 1981, Metcalf was acting in the company’s version of George Bernard Shaw’s “Arms and the Man” when she got an offer to join “Saturday Night Live.” (Tim Kazurinsky, a writer and cast member at the show, had recommended her.) This was the disastrous season in which Lorne Michaels had been replaced as producer by Jean Doumanian, who was quickly replaced by Dick Ebersol. Metcalf flew to New York—her first time on a plane—to be in one episode. “It was such a blur,” she recalled. “I immediately didn’t fit in.” She appeared in a single, pretaped sketch, asking people on the street if they’d take a bullet for the President. (Ronald Reagan had just been shot.) After a writers’ strike curtailed the season, most of the cast was fired, and Metcalf returned to Chicago.

She was back in New York in 1984, when Steppenwolf transferred its production of Lanford Wilson’s “Balm in Gilead” to Off Broadway’s Circle Rep. The play is set at an all-night coffee shop on upper Broadway, a way station for drifters, junkies, and prostitutes. For much of the show, the thirty-odd-person cast talks in an overlapping cacophony, to which Malkovich, who directed, added swells of Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen. In Act II, the action settles on Metcalf’s character, Darlene, a bubbly, wide-eyed transplant from Chicago, as she tells another patron an aimless story about getting a marriage license with her albino fiancé. The monologue lasts nearly twenty minutes. Toward the end, Darlene’s birdbrained prattle takes a heartrending turn, as it becomes clear that the marriage never happened and she was left, as Malkovich put it, “lost without knowing at all how lost she is.”

Steppenwolf first staged the play in 1980, in Chicago. Malkovich knew a salesgirl with an “alarming Chicago accent,” he said, and asked Metcalf to study her. “Nowadays, you’d have your dialect coach,” she told me. “I went with a little tape recorder and recorded this coat-store saleswoman.” As Malkovich recalled, Metcalf declined to rehearse the monologue until just before the first preview, and it emerged fully formed. The play was a watershed success for the company. When it moved to New York, Metcalf’s scene became a sensation. In the Times, Frank Rich called it a “tour de force.” Mantello, then fresh out of drama school, said that it “shifted the way I thought about acting.”

Recently, I went to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and watched the play on tape. Even on grainy video, I could see why the monologue was so mesmerizing. As Darlene, Metcalf happily blathers on, occasionally stirring her coffee, until the recollection of one tiny detail—finding the never-used marriage license in a drawer, a crease down its center—overwhelms her, and she sinks her head in her hand. Remembering it, Malkovich invoked Waits’s lyric about “a wound that will never heal.”

“I come from a long line of cats.”

Cartoon by P. C. Vey

By then, Metcalf was twenty-nine and had married Perry, after becoming pregnant with Zoe. While Metcalf performed the play every night, she’d leave her five-month-old daughter with a babysitting service. “Talk about being a struggling actor,” she recalled. “You’re not making anything and have a newborn, but you’re in a hit show.” Four decades later, people still stop her on the street and talk about “Balm in Gilead.” Among those who saw it were a pair of casting agents who put Metcalf in two projects. One was her first movie, “Desperately Seeking Susan,” as a flashy suburbanite. The other was “Roseanne.”

The executive producers of “The Cosby Show” Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner had wanted to build a sitcom around a working-class mother, and they devised “Roseanne,” to bottle Roseanne Barr’s winningly crude standup act. Barr played a version of herself, a wisecracking blue-collar mom named Roseanne Conner. When Metcalf auditioned, nothing had been written yet for Roseanne’s sister, Jackie, so she read some of Roseanne’s lines and got the part. She was initially hesitant about doing a sitcom. “I thought, Oh, my God, I’m going to be typecast for the rest of my life,” she said. Yet she moved to L.A.; she and Perry had split up, but he came along to help raise Zoe. (Perry later found fame on “Nash Bridges” and “Scandal.”)

Metcalf said, of meeting Barr, “I was intimidated by her, because she was self-made.” But they got along well, and their onscreen chemistry was instant. Where Barr’s character was deadpan and bullish, Jackie was overreactive and needy, forever bouncing among boyfriends and careers. “On the page was a very strong sister relationship, which Roseanne has in real life,” Metcalf said. “So my jumping-off point was to try to show that bond and then hit the jokes.” In the first season, Roseanne and Jackie work in a plastics factory. (George Clooney played their boss and Jackie’s love interest. “I miss his practical jokes,” Metcalf said. “He was sort of the life of the party.”) Neither actress was versed in sitcoms, but Metcalf had her co-star’s back. John Goodman, who played Roseanne’s husband, told me, “In the beginning, she called herself a tugboat, because she pulled Roseanne onto her marks.”

The show premièred on ABC in October, 1988; by its second season, it topped the Nielsen ratings. Metcalf didn’t realize how big it was until she was back in Chicago and got recognized at the zoo. Behind the scenes, “Roseanne” was legendarily rocky. Barr, enraged that the writer-producer Matt Williams was credited as the creator, stonewalled him until ABC ousted him. Showrunners would come and go. Barr installed Tom Arnold, her new husband, as a producer, and their antics filled the tabloids. At one point, Barr had “Property of Tom Arnold” tattooed on her buttocks.

Metcalf defended Barr’s push for authority. “I saw somebody refusing to settle for anything, and it had her goddam name on it, and she knew what she wanted,” she told me. “And I saw her being right by far the majority of the time.” The cast, she insisted, was mostly insulated from the drama. Goodman said, “As many difficulties as we had on the show, Laurie was my lodestar. She was solid gravity. She just rode the waves during a lot of that shit.” As the seasons went on, the writers played to Metcalf’s strengths, including physical comedy. “She used to compare herself to Don Knotts, and she pulled these Knottsian faces,” Goodman said. But the show made a point of tackling real problems—mortgage payments, birth control, and a subplot in which Jackie has an abusive boyfriend. (The actor who played him, Matt Roth, became Metcalf’s second husband; they divorced in 2014.) Sara Gilbert, who played Metcalf’s niece, said, “She can be completely absurd, but you don’t stop believing her.”

“Roseanne” concluded in 1997, after an ill-advised final season in which the Conners win the lottery. In 2018, the cast reunited for a tenth season, with Gilbert as an executive producer. Jackie was now a Jill Stein voter in a pussy hat, while Roseanne had voted for Donald Trump. In an America riven by the 2016 election and newly fascinated with the politics of the white working class, the revival was a smash; even Trump called Barr to congratulate her. But Barr’s real-life politics had slipped into QAnon territory. A week after the finale, she came under fire for a tweet comparing Barack Obama’s former adviser Valerie Jarrett to an ape, and the show was abruptly cancelled.

Metcalf learned of the cancellation from a news chyron while she was in New York starring in “Three Tall Women.” She’d been on a high from the reunion and hadn’t noticed a change in Barr. That fall, ABC revived the show as “The Conners,” which follows the family after its matriarch dies of an opioid overdose. (The real Roseanne tweeted furiously, “I AIN’T DEAD, BITCHES!!!!”) Metcalf was the last cast member to sign on. “We’d all had a personal relationship with Roseanne, and it was just not an easy decision for Laurie, or any of us,” Gilbert said.

“There was just a general sadness around the whole place,” Metcalf told me. Nevertheless, “The Conners” ran for seven seasons. Metcalf has not been in touch with Barr. “There’s nothing controversial,” she said. “We just haven’t spoken since we said goodbye at the end of the reboot.” Asked if she was angry at Barr for blowing up her own show, Metcalf laughed ruefully and replied, “I don’t even know how to answer that.”

During the original run of “Roseanne,” Metcalf built up a sporadic but memorable film career, appearing in “JFK” and “Scream 2” and voicing Andy’s mother in “Toy Story.” But she longed to get back to theatre. She had returned to Steppenwolf during summer breaks from “Roseanne,” and in 1995 made her belated Broadway début, in a flop called “My Thing of Love.” The Times review praised Metcalf but compared the script to “the very long mid-section of a sitcom episode.” Metcalf sensed a stigma. “I kind of had a target on me,” she said. “Like, ‘Let’s see if this TV actor can do theatre’—even though I had done a lot.”

Metcalf didn’t return to Broadway until 2007, as a White House speechwriter in David Mamet’s political satire “November,” directed by Mantello and starring Nathan Lane as the President. Nearly a decade later, having played a hospital administrator on the bleak HBO comedy “Getting On,” she joined a workshop of Hnath’s “A Doll’s House, Part 2.” It was her first stage collaboration with Scott Rudin, the high-powered producer of such films as “The Social Network” and “No Country for Old Men.” In Hnath’s imagining, Nora Helmer, who walks out on her family at the end of Ibsen’s 1879 drama, returns years later, a successful novelist. “Internal to every sentence was a remarkable amount of buried narrative, so it needed somebody who was thinking of her own story as she was essentially describing it,” Rudin told me. “I felt there was nobody but Laurie who could make a line mean so many different things.”

He sent Hnath an episode of Louis C.K.’s web series, “Horace and Pete,” in which Metcalf, playing Horace’s ex-wife, delivers an astonishing monologue about having exposed herself to her elderly father-in-law. (C.K.’s penchant for erotic exposure was revealed soon afterward.) “I was floored,” Hnath recalled. “It was really important to me to have a real theatre creature do this, because you have to move through the language relentlessly.” Rudin was also producing “Lady Bird” and suggested Metcalf to Gerwig, who told me that she’d wanted the character to be funny but “fierce in her love, her morals, and her person.”

The acclaim in 2017 for both projects launched a new phase for Metcalf. She starred in “Three Tall Women” the next year, and then “Hillary and Clinton” a year later. Both were produced by Rudin. Hnath had originally written “Hillary and Clinton” in 2008, but Rudin asked him to do a revision. “I sent it over, and he was, like, ‘O.K., great. Let’s send it to Laurie,’ ” the playwright recalled. The next season, Rudin mounted a revival of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” with Metcalf as Martha and Rupert Everett as George. Albee’s fearsome antiheroine seemed like the ultimate Metcalf role, though Mantello, who directed, recalled her struggling with Martha’s seductive side. It was March, 2020. Broadway’s first known case of COVID was a “Virginia Woolf” usher. The show shut down after nine previews and never returned. By the time Broadway reopened, Rudin had been drummed out of show business.

Rudin’s mistreatment of his staff was no secret. As far back as 1994, when he was producing movies for Paramount, horror stories about him partly inspired the indie revenge thriller “Swimming with Sharks,” with Kevin Spacey as a nightmare Hollywood boss. But the #MeToo era cast the lore in a harsher light. In April, 2021, The Hollywood Reporter published a cover story headlined “BULLY,” cataloguing tales of alleged abuse from Rudin’s revolving door of young assistants. The incidents included screamed invective (“You’re worth nothing!”) and hurled objects: a glass bowl, a stapler, a baked potato, a teacup. After one assistant failed to get him a seat on a fully booked flight, Rudin smashed a computer monitor on the man’s hand, resulting in a trip to the emergency room. “Everyone just knows he’s an absolute monster,” a former assistant said.

More stories came out, including that of Kevin Graham-Caso, who’d sought treatment for P.T.S.D. after assisting Rudin in the two-thousands. Years later, he died by suicide. His twin brother believed that Graham-Caso’s eight months in Rudin’s office had contributed to his mental-health decline. Rudin reportedly had forced him out of a car while driving, and Graham-Caso had e-mailed a friend, “I think the time at Rudin permanently fucked my nerves.” Besieged by exposés, Rudin announced that he was “profoundly sorry for the pain my behavior caused” and that he would “step back from active participation” on his Broadway shows, which included the hits “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Book of Mormon.”

Rudin retreated to Long Island. During his hiatus, it was not uncommon to hear theatre people express regret about his absence. Broadway was flailing after the pandemic, and not many producers had Rudin’s knack for turning an edgy new play into a splashy, must-see event. In 2024, Rudin sent up a trial balloon, advising the media mogul Barry Diller on arts programming for Little Island, Diller’s outdoor attraction on the Hudson River. Few objected. Last March, Rudin gave a comeback interview to the Times, saying that he had undergone “a decent amount of therapy.” A photo showed him looking contrite in a cozy sweater. “A lot of what was said was true. Some of what was said wasn’t true,” he told the Times. (He acknowledged yelling at assistants but said that he threw things “very, very rarely.”) Then he laid out a slate of four planned Broadway plays, three of which would star Metcalf, whom he called “the greatest actress in America.”

When I asked Metcalf about her decision to work with Rudin again, she fumbled for words before taking a piece of notebook paper from her fanny pack. She had reread his Times interview and jotted down notes. “He talked about his therapy, he apologized, he owned what he said, he reflected on it,” she said, haltingly. “He was in the process of rehabilitation. So I just think that, unless we think there is no possibility of real rehabilitation, then we shouldn’t ask people to try and do it.” She sighed, unsure of herself. “I knew you would ask me at some point. It’s so touchy. It’s so hard.”

“Little Bear Ridge Road” was originally commissioned by Steppenwolf, which premièred it in Chicago in 2024, starring Metcalf. Rudin offered to bring it to New York as his first Broadway show after the self-imposed exile, but Steppenwolf declined to work with him.

“It didn’t feel in alignment with our values and mission that he would come back on Steppenwolf’s name,” someone involved with the theatre company told me. “In a precarious moment where we were rebuilding back from the pandemic, why would we partner with someone who the industry felt really harmed by? We can’t be a vehicle for someone to prove that they’ve changed.” When Steppenwolf pressed him on how he’d reformed, the person I spoke to recalled, Rudin “never made us feel that he had done the work.”

At first, Metcalf was open to finding another producer to bring the play to Broadway, but none materialized. Steppenwolf, still refusing to partner with Rudin, held firm. Metcalf was distraught; she wanted the play to have a future. Caught between her longtime theatrical home and her most powerful champion, she took the extraordinary step of threatening to quit Steppenwolf unless it relinquished the rights. The theatre, facing the defection of one of its most prominent members, took this as an ultimatum. In the end, Steppenwolf agreed to release the rights, clearing the way for Rudin to make his return to Broadway. When “Little Bear” arrived in New York, last fall, Steppenwolf was acknowledged in a note in the Playbill, but the names above the title were Scott Rudin and Barry Diller. The play was critically admired but commercially disappointing, and it closed eight weeks early.

I asked Metcalf about her standoff with Steppenwolf. “I can’t really go into that, because that’s something I haven’t even figured out for myself, my relationship back there,” she said, tearing up. She has not been involved in Steppenwolf’s current season, its fiftieth. “I want my own celebration of that, and I want to celebrate it with some of the Old Guard,” she went on, crying as she folded up the notebook paper. “I want to go back in time, and I want to be brave with the people who taught me to be brave. I don’t want to worry if something is not P.C.—not to trigger people. Just to be daring. Controversial, if it wants to be. Back then, we didn’t have to be so scared that we were going to step on somebody’s toes and get brought down. We won’t call it the fiftieth. We’ll call it something else. It’ll be like getting the band back together for one last tour, you know?”

When I spoke to Rudin, he was eager to praise Metcalf. “She’s able to embody psychology and behavior and make them absolutely spontaneous in any moment,” he said, sounding jovial. He compared her to Geraldine Page and Maureen Stapleton, mid-century performers who came out of the Actors Studio, co-founded by the director Elia Kazan: “She’s like a Kazan actress—that sort of full, fleshy, remarkably bright ability to play women who would normally be overlooked but somehow elbow their way to the front of your perception.” It was one of the most insightful things anyone had told me about Metcalf.

To arrange my call with Rudin, I’d exchanged e-mails with his current assistant. I brought up his name to Metcalf and asked if, given Rudin’s past record with assistants, she ever felt a responsibility to check in on the guy. She didn’t recognize the name at first, then said, “I don’t feel the need to check in.” Rudin was using her talent to rebuild his reputation, but it’s hard to say whether she should have to answer for his sins. She was far from the only person enabling his comeback, yet she had planted her flag in the Rudin camp more definitively than anybody. She contained her tears, still crumpling the notebook page, her prop for this uneasy scene. Then, in a moment of clarity, she looked up and said, “I find it hypocritical that some people want to work with him but didn’t want to be the first.”

One evening in March, I went to the Winter Garden to see the final run-through of “Death of a Salesman.” Looming over the marquee outside was a billboard with the play’s most famous line—one of Linda’s—spelled out in giant letters: “Attention must be paid.” It was Rudin’s patented prestige bombast. The Winter Garden seats sixteen hundred people (“Cats” ran there for eighteen years), making it the largest theatre Metcalf has ever played.

Before the run-through began, I sat with Metcalf in the audience. “I don’t consider anything locked down right now,” she said. “It’s all open to experiment.” But she was fairly settled on her final speech. “Salesman” ends with Linda standing at Willy’s grave, after he has crashed his car so that Biff can get a life-insurance payout. She says:

Forgive me, dear. I can’t cry. I don’t know what it is, but I can’t cry. I don’t understand it. Why did you ever do that? Help me, Willy, I can’t cry. . . . Why did you do it? I search and search and I search, and I can’t understand it, Willy. I made the last payment on the house today. Today, dear. And there’ll be nobody home. We’re free and clear.

In the script, Miller indicates that a sob rises in her throat, and the play ends with her overcome with tears. “I feel like I have permission as the interpreter to cross all those out,” Metcalf said, of the stage directions. She looked only at what Linda says. “I take her at her word that she can’t cry and she’s not quite sure why,” she explained. “I think there’s a lot of emotion going through her, but it doesn’t come out in the form of tears. A lot of talk about how ‘we were this close, and you do this?’ There’s betrayal.”

She went up to her dressing room to put on her wig, run her lines, and work on a jigsaw puzzle. The lights went down, and I watched the play from a mostly empty house. The graveyard speech, far from being plaintive, was undergirded by dumbfounded rage. And Metcalf had added a prop: she pulled the deed to the house from her purse, placed it in the dirt, and used her foot to bury it. No tears.

Afterward, I noticed Rudin nearby. That night, an Off Broadway play he was producing had opened downtown, and the raves were pouring in. “We have to get quotes out,” he said, beaming, and urged his press team to work fast. He was back in business.

Metcalf reappeared in a hoodie. “There’s still so much little detail work to be found,” she said; the audience response would tell her a lot. The deed had been her idea. “I try to think in symbols,” she told me. “So I figured, Why not pull it out?” Throwing it on the grave would have been clichéd, she continued, “so I thought, What is about as anticlimactic as you can get? I set it on the ground and cover it up with dirt.” It was a bold choice, but true to a Linda who had put up a lot of walls. “This is my Linda,” Metcalf said. “And there’s no right or wrong ever in acting.” ♦