It’s hard to say which Barr causes Laurie Metcalf more anguish: Roseanne or William.

As I sat down with the actress on a recent Sunday evening at Orso on West 46th Street, heads were exploding over the attorney general’s four-page memo summarizing the Mueller report as exonerating President Trump of colluding with the Russians.

Even though she has never done Shakespeare, Ms. Metcalf looked in this moment like she was in the third act of a Shakespearean tragedy. I promptly ordered some pinot noir.

“This is truly, truly upsetting and unsettling,” she said, “and this low-grade panic attack I’ve been living under just went to orange. I had such high hopes of him being out of office before 2020.”

Ms. Metcalf is on Broadway conjuring Hillary Clinton to John Lithgow’s Bill in “Hillary and Clinton,” a play directed by Joe Mantello and written by Lucas Hnath, whose play about another knotty marriage, “A Doll’s House, Part 2,” won Ms. Metcalf a Tony in 2017.