Laurie Metcalf’s Third Act | The New Yorker

Somewhere in the bowels of Lincoln Center, Laurie Metcalf was in a rehearsal room, talking quietly with director Joe Mantello. It was February, a few days before the new Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” opened at the Winter Garden Theater. Four weeks into rehearsals, the cast – led by Nathan Lane, as delusional, doomed salesman Willy Loman – was still putting the finishing touches to the implosion of the Loman family. Metcalf, who played Willy’s wife Linda, had read the play in high school but deliberately avoided seeing a production. “I thought maybe later I would be able to play the role, so I didn’t want anyone’s performance stuck in my head,” she explained. The same was true for Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” ” and Mary Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” – characters Metcalf had faced over the past fifteen years. “I stayed away from bucket list type roles, just in case,” she said, then let out a hearty laugh. “And now, in my worship, here they are!”

Metcalf’s turn as a Broadway eminence was far from assured. Since the 1980s, viewers have known her as the rootless, rubbery Aunt Jackie from the sitcom “Roseanne.” Those most familiar with the stage know her as a founding member of the Steppenwolf Theater Company, the red-blooded Chicago troupe that emerged in the ’70s and launched such talents as John Malkovich, Gary Sinise and Joan Allen. In 2017 and 2018, Metcalf won two consecutive 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 has been hailed as the new First Lady of American theater, a nickname once given to Helen Hayes. In the TimesBen Brantley wrote that Metcalf achieved the stage career “that Meryl Streep might have had if she had not abandoned Broadway for Hollywood.”

None of this cheer imbued Metcalf with greatness. At seventy, she remains a beast of burden. She excels at playing women with tough exteriors, rough edges and working-class muscles – salt-of-the-earth people, with extra salt. This is certainly the case for 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 products from the shows she’s done,” Mantello observed.) The cast, which that morning had undergone mandatory harassment training—“So, there you go,” Metcalf said flatly—included Christopher Abbott and Ben Ahlers, as Willy and Linda’s deadbeat sons, Biff and Happy. They took their seats for a climactic scene in Act II in which Linda berates her sons for their mistreatment of their father, who crawls in the dirt outside, his spirit unraveling, planting a garden in the middle of the night. Mantello removed the naturalistic kitchen sink set; in the rehearsal room, a plywood box stood in for a red 1964 Chevrolet that would dominate the stage. In the scene, Linda throws away a bouquet of flowers her sons bought to appease her and shouts, “Get out of my sight.” Metcalf let out a venomous hiss at the line, before raising his voice to a scream. “I got too hot, too fast,” she told Mantello afterward, echoing Linda’s emotional melody.

Nathan Lane, who plays Willy Loman in “Salesman,” was eager to have Metcalf as his wife, Linda: “I knew she would find this strength and this fierce protectiveness in Willy, and that it wouldn’t be sentimental in any way.”Photography by Emilio Madrid

The scene was interrupted when one of Lane’s seed bags burst, spilling everywhere, and the cast became hysterical. Lane, turning to the hammer, yelled, “I hope to have a whole salad in the spring!” Clowning around, Metcalf and Ahlers launched into a little bow-legged jump. Then it was back to work. I was sitting behind a table, next to a man in a brown sweater who was peering intently through wire-rimmed glasses. It’s producer Scott Rudin who, more than anyone, is responsible for Metcalf’s prolific third act. In 2021, amid allegations that he bullied his staff (abusive tirades, thrown office supplies), Rudin took a step 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 nurse from Idaho. By making “Salesman,” she strengthened their partnership, even though Rudin remains a controversial figure in the industry.