Laurie Metcalf and Her Double

JIGSAW PUZZLES—THAT’S HOW LAURIE METcalf occupies her offstage time, she told me recently after a rehearsal for the Broadway premiere of Hillary and Clinton, in which she’ll play a version of the former First Lady and presidential candidate. It’s a tempting metaphor for the way she pieces together her performances from discrete clues and suggestions and choices, or for the way she’s assembled a uniquely distinguished career of stage and screen roles over four decades.

It also feels wrong, on more than one level. Though a typical Metcalf performance comprises thousands of tiny details and decisions—an odd inflection that brings out both a line’s meaning and its opposite, a birdlike twist of the neck at unexpected news, a gait that somehow conveys the pace of her thoughts—there is nothing piecemeal about the effect. She may work like a pointillist, laying down her dots with meticulous care, but the canvases she produces give us portraits of whole people, even when those people are shattered. Indeed if I had to come up with one word to describe her work, it would be soulful (yes, even in the comedies; especially in the comedies).

It’s also a mistake to see her far-flung stage résumé—roles in London, New York, L.A., Chicago—as scattered or disparate. One of the founding members of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Metcalf found in that basement-ensemble-turned-regional-powerhouse both a home base and that most precious of theatrical commodities, a true company ethic. She’d play a meaty lead in one show, do a scene-stealing walk-on in another, contribute sound design to a third. And though she’s no longer based in the Windy City and has appeared at Steppenwolf only twice in the last decade, the ensemble ethos is in her bones, and theatres are her homing beacon in whatever city she’s in; she can’t stay away for long from the collaborative frisson of a rehearsal room, whether it’s at the National Theatre in London or in a North Hollywood storefront. “I’m such a theatre addict,” she told me, without qualification or apology. Said her ex-husband, Steppenwolf co-founder Jeff Perry, “Laurie would perform with a