Austin Pendleton, who became a member of the company in the ’80s, says working with Steppenwolf was “like opening a broom closet and finding the future of American acting.” Joan Allen, John Malkovich, Glenne Headly and Tracy Letts are just some of the company’s other members, nearly all of whom are recognizable from television, movies or theater. In the beginning, they all had day jobs. Metcalf was a legal secretary who could bang out 120 words a minute. When work was over, they would head to the basement theater and work some more, a commune, an incestuous sibling society (Metcalf dated Kinney first and then Malkovich, before marrying Perry, the father of her oldest child, the actress Zoe Perry). They picked their plays, cast them, directed when they drew the short straw, drank beer, ushered, took tickets, cleaned the bathroom and sold subscriptions. They cast themselves in parts no one else would have let them play. Metcalf was a septuagenarian in “True West” and a 14-year-old girl. She stole a show as the ugliest, flirtiest woman in the world, gave a monologue with yarn in her mouth and played Laura from “The Glass Menagerie” as profoundly mentally ill, a performance that drew critics from Chicago and that the people who saw it still speak of in reverent tones.

Metcalf was in her late 20s when her oldest daughter was born. She left her at home with a sitter every night that she appeared in the 1983 Off Broadway staging of Lanford Wilson’s “Balm in Gilead,” a performance that has become the stuff of Broadway legend. A vast ensemble piece, set around a scruffy New York City diner, it was memorably punctuated by Metcalf’s 20-minute monologue as the inane, sweet prostitute Darlene, who prattles on and on until both she and the audience are in tears. After being cast in “Roseanne” — during just a two-week visit to California to audition for some movies — she moved to Los Angeles, where she still lives. She raised three children with her ex-husband Matt Roth, who played her abusive boyfriend on “Roseanne.” Her oldest son is now grown, and Metcalf lives with her teenage son and 12-year-old daughter. When she won the Tony Award for “A Doll’s House Part 2,” she thanked them for allowing her to be away so much.

Metcalf has previously referred to herself as a workaholic, but when I asked her if this was true, she amended: “I can’t even call it work. I’m a creative-a-holic. I love the tearing into new material.” She recalls filming a three-person scene during the first season of “Roseanne,” in which she didn’t have much dialogue. During a break, the director came over and said to her, “You know, you don’t have to be acting during this part, because you’re not on camera.” Recalling this moment three decades later, she still can’t keep the outrage from her voice. “That’s the strangest thing I’ve ever heard! What would I do, just drop out? Just pull the plug and go dead for a while as they’re sitting two feet away from me?”

There is a brawny, brainy populism to her high artistry, reflected in the everyday women she likes to play. Aunt Jackie is a hysterically funny working-class neurotic, lost and searching. In a 20-minute monologue in “Horace & Pete,” Metcalf uses only her face to tell a genuinely erotic tale of middle-aged desire. In HBO’s “Getting On,” which ended in 2015, her Jenna James, a geriatric doctor with the bedside manner of a rude telemarketer, is a cringe-comedy buffoon, whom Metcalf gives a soul. In “Lady Bird,” Metcalf plays Marion McPherson with enough verve and eye rolls to transcend the cliché of the nagging mother, suggesting with her performance that adolescent energy may not fade, so much as age into a more potent vintage. Her characters are high-strung women in the thick of busy lives, whose interiors Metcalf, from the midst of her own busy life, evokes with care, ingenuity and intensity. “I’m not trying to blow out a camera lens or make the audience’s hair go straight back from my sheer volume, sheer energy level,” Metcalf says, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t hold onto your hat.

At the end of the first week of rehearsal for “Three Tall Women,” I met Metcalf in a Theater Row restaurant, the kind that has a mad dinner rush before the shows start at 8. She arrived in a puffy coat and a bright orange hat topped with a grand gray pompom, the same gray cowl neck sweater she wore during rehearsal, jeans and a pair of running shoes. Metcalf is extremely slight and unassuming, yet substantial. Perfectly engaging, she is not, like some actors, “on.” She has the slightly Midwestern air of a woman who is politely clocking everything but holding back her judgments until among friends. When the waiter asked us if we would like a five-ounce or eight-ounce pour of red wine, Metcalf emphatically selected the larger. Then she barely sipped it.