Hillary and Clinton
Written by Lucas Hnath
Directed by Joe Mantello
Golden Theatre
June 8, 2019
Production website
💉💉💉💉 out of 5.

Laurie Metcalf rules Broadway in the summer.  One year Three Tall Women, one year Doll’s House Part 2, this year Lucas Hnath’s Hillary and Clinton – and a possible next summer with a Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf.  And each one just keeps getting better and better.  In way of thinking what makes Laurie Metcalf so wonderful on stage is the great ease she brings to her work.  You sense no effort on her part.  She is not obviously working.  She is simply talking, reading and being with her partner – there is no artifice here.

Hillary and Clinton is a most unique play.  Ms. Metcalf starts the play in a direct address where she makes clear that what we will be observing is not intended as an imitation of reality past or present. We should instead pretend, she says, “that light years away from here on one of those other planet Earths that’s like this one but slightly different that there’s a woman named Hillary.”

The play takes place in a stripped to the bone white hotel room as she is struggling against her floundering campaign and the repeated assertion that she just doesn’t have any feelings – that no one can connect to her as a candidate.  For all of her passion and qualifications there is just no way out of this.  Bill offers her little help.  Ever since his sexual peccadillo, Bill has done more harm than good to her.  Why didn’t she just leave him when she could ?  Didn’t she know this would make women all over the world despise her?  Was she that much in love with her husband?  Is she still in love?

What I loved about this play was its homage to Theatre of the Absurd.  Hillary and Linton became a modern Vladimir and Estragon in their own Waiting for Godot.  But of course, in this world, she is not waiting for Godot – she is waiting for Obama – who soon arrives in the play with news just as helpful as that of the never-to-show Godot. 

But I could watch Laurie Metcalf read the phone book – so perhaps I am not the most discerning  of audience members.