If the universe is infinite, as we believe that it is, and if we believe in random chance, as we do, then it holds that someplace else out there in this infinite universe, there are other planets much like Earth, on which there are other people much like our own. This is what Laurie Metcalf tells us, perhaps as Laurie Metcalf and perhaps as Hillary Clinton, after she ambles on stage at the start of Hillary and Clinton, in which she stars as the titular pantsuit enthusiast, calmly switches on some overhead lights, and finds a hand mic.
On such an imaginary Earth-like planet, she continues, there could be a person named Hillary. But Metcalf/Clinton does not invite us to imagine that this Hillary-like person on an Earth-like country is now president; such a desperately appealing alternative reality is not, alas, with playwright Lucas Hnath has in mind. Rather, we are to imagine that this Hillary-like person is campaigning for the presidency. In 2008.
That’s when the hulking, angled, bright-white set—if James Turrell had made it, you’d wait patiently to climb aboard, and you’d be required to put booties over your shoes—slides downstage, and Metcalf, now definitely Hillary, steps onto it. We’re in a New Hampshire hotel room, and Hillary is losing the primary to an upstart named Barack Obama. She pulls on a patterned Patagonia fleece, the kind suitable to long walks in the Westchester woods. And then she calls Bill, and asks him to come north.
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★★★ review here.]
That’s when it’s clear: Hillary and Clinton, an intriguing, fulfilling sketch of a fantasy that opened tonight at the Golden Theatre, is not The West Wing, a counterfactual of a competent, kind, White House to comfort us amid its opposite. It is instead M*A*S*H, looking back at an earlier war, to help us understand our current quagmire. The situation is real, or realish: the three characters arguing are Hillary, Bill, and Hillary’s campaign strategist, Mark Penn, and Hillary really did barely eke out a win. But the interactions are imagined: It’s the hard look we all wish we take at the Clintons’ marriage behind closed doors.
If you’re going to watch scenes from a marriage, you could do worse to have the combatants portrayed by Metcalf and her Bill, John Lithgow. The two actors, like the two Clintons, are big, controlling people with big, commanding presences. Neither attempts an impersonation (as Hnath’s scripts instructs them not to). Your focus, therefore, moves from what they look like to what they’re saying. What we’re watching is the world’s most competently performed therapeutic role-play.
But the therapy, as Hnath has ably constructed it, isn’t for the Clintons; it is for us.
Ultimately, nothing really happens during Hillary and Clinton. Hill and Bill stand in a hotel room, sometimes they sit, and they occasionally hug and occasionally fight. Sometimes, campaign strategist Mark (an equally forceful Zak Orth) argues with them. Eventually, Barack Obama appears (in the less convincing form of Peter Francis James), and he plays hard ball. Instead, for 90 minutes or so, it’s simply an imagination of what life must be like for this unusual couple.
Bill is hangdog when he needs to be, and manipulative. He craves Hillary’s attention and affirmation. Hillary never lets him forget Monica, because how could she. Hillary is exhausted and beleaguered. She’s jealous of Bill’s easy ability to connect with a crowd, and sad about the shit she’s has to endure. “When do I get this magnificent version of Bill that everyone else seems to get except for me,” she asks. “ I would very much love to spend some time with him and to get the chance to feel the way all of those other people get to feel.” She considers the merits of divorce, and knows it would be good for her, but she also knows she could never do it.
Mostly, though, she allows Hnath to articulate an observation that makes perfect sense, that is perhaps Hillary’s tragedy: What if everything she had to do to get through being Bill’s wife, the control and the discipline and, yes, the repression needed to persevere through the women and blue dress the impeachment and, yes, the vast right-wing conspiracy — and don’t tell me, on Bob Barr Day, that there’s no such thing — what if all of those things that allowed her to reach a point where she was a serious contender for the presidency, what if they are the things that made her unrelatable, perhaps unlikeable, insufficiently humanized to win?
It is perhaps not the world’s most original observation. But portrayed within the bounds of this relationship, by these fine actors on this crucible of a set and under Joe Mantello’s expertly controlled direction, it is deeply provocative. (The pitch-perfect costumes—for a while, Bill appears for no good reason in those joggers’ short short you’ll never quite forget from 1992—are by Rita Ryack, and the striking set and lights are by Chloe Lamford and Hugh Vanstone.)
Hillary and Clinton, unlike its subjects, is arguably inconsequential. It’s a slim, impressionistic portrait. But it’s just enough. With this production, these actors, this marriage, a little bit is a lot.
Hillary and Clinton opened April 18, 2019, at the Golden Theatre and runs through June 23. Tickets and information: hillaryandclintonbroadway.com
