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