She’s all wrong for that part.

That was my first reaction on hearing that Laurie Metcalf would be playing the blowzy, lusty hostess from hell, Martha, in Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” on Broadway this spring. My second reaction was that I should know better by now.

After all, I had felt the same way eight years ago when I read that Metcalf was appearing as Mary Tyrone, the genteel, morphine-addled mother in a London revival of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” I again raised a skeptical eyebrow when I learned that Metcalf had been cast as the Ibsen heroine Nora Helmer (in Lucas Hnath’s “A Doll’s House, Part 2”) and, a year later, as the embittered middle-aged matron in Albee’s “Three Tall Women.”

And how likely was it that Metcalf would be convincing as Hillary Clinton in Hnath’s “Hillary and Clinton,” seen on Broadway last year?