Metcalf Takes To The Stage ‘Roseanne’ Actress Signs Up For Role In New York Theater
A lot of factors have accounted for the success of the 7-year-old “Roseanne” show, beginning with the mercurial, to say the least, star herself.
The comedy series was the first of its era to show a representative class of working stiffs left out of the golden glow of “Morning in America,” as if the decade had finally wised up to the Huxtables’ semiprecious role modeling.
And the show has evolved.
Its intuition tells us that if the principal blue-collar strains of the late 1980s were economic, those pressures have imploded into ‘90s family life.
Too, the show’s producers had the good sense to surround Roseanne, an acting amateur, with solid pros, particularly John Goodman and Laurie Metcalf. Goodman’s gregarious face and hefty frame have become a familiar sight on TV and the big screen.
And serious “Roseanne” watchers have a particular regard for Metcalf’s Jackie, who can never seem to get herself out of harm’s way.
“I like to play a wide range of characters,” Metcalf says. “The more they’re unlike me, the better I like it. But Jackie is so close to my own personality that I still feel selfconscious playing her. She’s someone I haven’t solved.”
Fans, especially women, recognize in Jackie a quick intelligence and an appealing, voluble alertness, an optimistic view held firmly in the wrong direction and a woman who is author of her own disappointment.
The first to show up at the door to help out in a crisis (when she isn’t announcing one of her own), she enters to make things worse, to inject her own complexes into complex matters. You have to love her spunk.
More professional observers see in Metcalf a superb actress at work. From a hairstyle that looks as if it were cut in a fan blade to a body that appears stressed even in wiry repose, Metcalf’s presence alone conveys Jackie’s imbalances. Beyond that, she has clear-water emotional transparency.
Every conflicting emotion is visible in her face, and she has a capacity, rare among actors, for active listening.
“I’ve learned so much from her,” says Roseanne. “She’s from a theatrical tradition. I’m from standup. It’s a different approach.
“She was very helpful to me in the beginning. She works in her own way, but it pulls everyone together. She’s just awesome.”
“Her strength stems from her commitment to a role,” says John Goodman. “She’s my rock.
“I have an amazing capacity for self-pity, but when I get that way, I just look at her and see how she slides through effortlessly. The choices she makes are astoundingly brilliant. She won’t go for the safe or the tried-andtrue.”
Such honeyed tribute is the norm among show-biz ensembles, which tend to be self-protective. But from “Roseanne’s” tempestuous beginning, with its steady report of hateful hates and conversations with flying plates, you can detect a note of genuine appreciation from veterans of the carnage who would look back wearily and say, “Well, there’s always Laurie,” as though, by standing above it all with statuesque inscrutability, she offered comfort.
Metcalf is off to New York during hiatus to play a wife betrayed in Alexandra Gersten’s “My Thing of Love,” opening May 3 at the Martin Beck Theatre.
And, in a rare gesture of solidarity and affection, some “Roseanne” cast members have taped several commercial TV spots, now airing in New York, to help get the word out.
From the “Roseanne” set Goodman offers her avuncular notes on how to conduct herself as a star. Estelle Parsons, who remains in character as Jackie and Roseanne’s mother, begs for tickets to any Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. And Roseanne wonders aloud just how long Jackie’s “love thing” really is.
The spots are funny. The play - which deals with the love triangle of a husband (Tom Irwin), his wife (Metcalf) and his mistress (Sheila Kelley) - is not.
But it brings Metcalf back not only to a role she created in 1992 in Chicago but also to the thing she may do best - theater. She’s a three-time Emmy Award winner for her support on “Roseanne,” but nothing matches the superlatives she has earned for her stage work.
It was Metcalf’s Obie-winning performance as the prostitute in a 1984 New York production of “Balm in Gilead” that created sufficient buzz to reach the ears of “Roseanne’s” casting directors.
“(Producer) Marcy Carsey told us about her before the show was cast,” Roseanne recalls. “She said, ‘We’ve got the greatest actress in the country to play Jackie.’ We were psyched.”
It’s hard to tell what Metcalf thinks of these kinds of accolades; that is, if she disbelieves them or doesn’t think she deserves them or writes them off as the requisite celebrity backslapping accorded anyone riding a hit show.
From her demeanor, it appears almost as if they belong to someone else (when she discusses her characters, she often looks pointedly away, as though they were rounding a corner down the street).
She is nothing if not self-effacing.
“I almost never give interviews,” she said recently during a rehearsal break in North Hollywood. “It’s not because I want to play hard to get. It’s just that I never seem to have anything interesting to say.”
The actress’s personality seems sturdily constructed out of the cardinal Midwestern virtues of laconism, moderation, sincerity and a bone-deep conviction that selfreference constitutes the height of vulgarity.
Even her dry laugh is an expression of watchful restraint, not a promising portrait of a young artist.