The theater veteran Laurie Metcalf, best known as Jackie, Roseanne Barr's high-strung sidekick sister on the popular 1990s sitcom "Roseanne," is back on Broadway. Metcalf, an Emmy Award-winning actress, is currently reprising her leading role as Juliana Smithton, a biophysicist battling dementia in Joe Mantello's "The Other Place," running through March 3 at Manhattan Theater Club's Samuel J. Friedman's Theater. In the show - and in approximately 80 minutes - Metcalf takes the audience on a gut-wrenching ride as her nefarious disease leaves a path of heartbreaking destruction. Her performance is haunting and left T with many questions, which Metcalf generously answered. You won an Obie Award and the Lucille Lortel Award for the original Off Broadway performance of "The Other Place." What is the difference between that production and the one that's on Broadway now? As far as doing it a second time around, I enjoy doing that because I had a year and a half off from it, and I didn't know that I'd ever have a chance to do it again. But it stays with you, you know? Six months later, I'd find myself thinking, 'Oh, that's how I should have said that line,' or 'I wish I would have done this a little differently, played this differently,' or 'I never explored that, I should have. ' Like when people say if they could go back to high school knowing then what they know now ... It sounds simplistic, but I've had different life experiences during that year and a half. And you bring those experiences into the rehearsal room with you. What I found so compelling about what you were doing was - and I don't know how this will come across - I could see you aging onstage over the course of the show's 80 minutes. In the beginning you are a controlled, powerful woman, and by the end your face shows so much pain and illness. What was that emotional and physical process like? I've never been told that, so I'm really glad it looks that way. But you know some of it is just technical. I mean, I look very different at the end than I do at the beginning. And also, the energy is different. At the end I'm really driving it, you know? At the beginning I have confidence, and posture and sarcasm, and I am very angular. The energy changes once I hit - I guess when we go back in time to the Cape Cod house. There are times where I can physically relax my whole body, finally, and just kind of go limp, in moments at the end. Do you have any personal experience with dementia or did you study patients with it? I don't have experience with it firsthand, so I had to research it. I did go to a senior living home where many of the patients were suffering from that. And then a lot of it I did online. People are generous in sharing what they've documented with their relatives online. As an audience member I really felt for both you and Daniel Stern's character, Ian, who plays your husband. I felt quite badly for your character, but then also incredibly badly for your husband's, and there's a level of frustration, too. It's hard to know who you have more compassion for, or who you're more frustrated with. Yeah [laughs]. I know. What's the dance like with Daniel on the stage and how did you both get to a place that you were able to make it so compelling? To the playwright Sharr White's credit, he's got all that in there. I think he's tried to look at it from all sides and as honestly as possible. That gave us the courage to play it as honestly as possible, with all the warts, and ugliness, and lashing out, and cruelty, and frustration that comes with the territory. Zoe Perry is your biological daughter and also plays your daughter onstage. What was that experience like for you? It must be very emotional for her to watch her mother fall into the horrors of dementia every night onstage. Weirdly, I think it affected her more when she actually sat out and watched it, you know, when we did it a year and a half ago and she was still an audience member. Because it was me up there. At the end of the play your daughter feeds you takeout Chinese food. And if you're sitting in the audience, the smell of the food is so fragrant. What are you eating? And do you have the same menu every night? Same thing every night. Broccoli and tofu. It tastes good, so I'm actually looking forward to it. I like to start the play kind of hungry. You have spent so much time in the theater. You've played so many amazing characters. Is there a role that you would love to play? I've been wanting to do Virginia Woolf, but it's onstage now so it looks like I probably won't be able to do that anytime soon. I think I missed the boat on that one.