A mighty sigh — equal parts frustration and resignation — seems to animate “Hillary and Clinton,” Lucas Hnath’s piquant, slender new play about … well, it’s about exactly what, and whom, its title suggests. This production, which opened on Thursday night at the Golden Theater under the suave direction of Joe Mantello, is indeed a portrait of a marriage between two extremely well-known American politicians. As for that propulsive sigh, it emanates from the title character called Hillary, who spends the surprisingly airy 90 minutes of this show in what might be called a state of angry wistfulness. It is our very good fortune that Hillary is portrayed by Laurie Metcalf, an actress who does being thwarted better than anyone. And make no mistake. Though “Hillary and Clinton” features an excellent John Lithgow as the male half of this power couple, Mr. Hnath’s latest offering is ultimately all about Hillary. It is asking us to see the world through the eyes of a woman who ostensibly has all the right stuff to be president and yet is never allowed to win. Staged in an earlier version in Chicago in April 2016, when it seemed likely that the real Mrs. Clinton would be the next resident of the White House, “Hillary and Clinton” has acquired a fresh topicality since her loss in that year’s presidential election to Donald J. Trump. You can feel the audience at the Golden nodding in collective agreement when Mr. Lithgow’s Bill Clinton — in a New Hampshire hotel room during the 2008 Democratic primary — explains the importance of grabbing the electorate by their hearts, not their minds.<doc-sep>If anyone could play Hillary Clinton, it’s Laurie Metcalf – and here she is, in Lucas Hnath’s “Hillary and Clinton,” giving a performance that feels painfully honest and true. And if anyone could capture Bill Clinton’s feckless but irresistible charm, that would be John Lithgow – and here he is, too. Who better to work with these actors, sounding the depths of these iconic figures, than director Joe Mantello, who is also on deck. The only thing wrong in this fictionalized visit to the 2008 primary — the one that saw Barack Obama claim the Democratic nomination for president over Hillary — is that playwright Hnath, Tony nominated for “A Doll’s House, Part 2,” has brought nothing of substance to the table. The characters stand up. The language is strong. But like Claudius’s earnest prayer to his resolutely unimpressed God in “Hamlet,” nothing said by either party reaches the heavens. Glenda Jackson has observed that characters in a play don’t know they are characters in a play: “They’re just living their lives.” Hnath would like us to honor that fiction here. Don’t imitate the “real” Hillary and Bill, he says in a program note. Pretend you’ve never heard of the Clintons. Create entirely new characters. (Lots of luck with that.) The play opens in 2008 in a hotel room in New Hampshire, where not-Clinton and not-Obama are slugging it out for the nomination. And while not-Obama (a shaky Peter Francis James) makes a surprise appearance to make a surprise move, the focus is on not-Hillary and not-Bill, who are at odds on the best political tactics for prevailing in the primaries and snagging the nomination. In a speech directed at the audience, Hillary keeps flipping a coin while ruminating on the existential possibility that the reality she’s living is not necessarily the only reality floating around up there in the universe. She’s lagging behind Obama in the polls and playing with the notion that maybe, in some alternate reality in this infinite universe of possibilities, she will beat this upstart who has jumped the line of accession, prevailing against him in New Hampshire. (Now that’s a play I really want to see.) “I’ve been campaigning for close to a year now. I haven’t slept. I’m tired. I’m very tired.” Metcalf, who is dressed in baggy comfort-clothes by Rita Ryack, looks as exhausted as she sounds. Running for president is no country for old men or middle-aged women who need their sleep, so Hillary has a heart-to-heart with her campaign manager, Josh, played like a proper cheerleader by Zak Orth. She needs money, she needs poll numbers, she needs encouragement, she needs sleep. Josh explains that being the underdog is actually working for her. “So me losing is a strategy?” she snaps back at him. Snap, snap, snap. For a while, Hnath gets away with the sympathetic characters and their snappy dialogue. But it’s inevitable that Hillary would give in to her baser political instincts and call Bill for help. “He’s good where he is, which is far from here,” says Josh, who managed to kick the bad-boy ex-president off the campaign and into the wilderness. But it’s obvious where this is going, and we’re all thrilled when Bill (Lithgow, looking ready for bear) saunters through the door. Surely that’s the signal that something will actually happen in this static play. But, no, this Bill person turns out to be just another mouthpiece for clever chit-chat. “When you start to lose, you pull out,” Bill advises his wife. “Pull out fast. Don’t linger. People linger. People get up there, they linger and they die. Then they rot. They rot in public. Don’t let them see you rot.” Besides pulling off terrific political pep talks like that, Hnath also gets the intimate cadences of a close couple’s domestic rhythms, and lets Metcalf and Lithgow have their fun. But what about us? Where’s our fun? In an alternate reality, surely Hillary would be Queen of the Universe and Bill would be picking her up in a golden chariot. Let’s see that play.<doc-sep>Except that we also know — maybe from our having lived with these two for so long — that their connection is passionate where politics are concerned, that his instincts, plus her tenacity, were for so long a winning combination. There’s a sense of them trying to restart this formula in “Hillary and Clinton,” because otherwise, the air seems to have gone out of their relationship: The playwright allows in a framing device for us to contemplate Hillary’s perspective on what hasn’t happened for her, as she tries to convince herself that her destiny is out of her control.<doc-sep>Laurie Metcalf as the candidate herself. Photo: Julieta Cervantes When you were in high school, were you taught, as I was, to write essays using the general-specific-general template? I think of an hourglass shape: Essentially, we were taught to make some sweeping statement, connect it to our topic, talk about our topic, then zoom way back out again. “In all of human history, people have always fought wars. This reminds me of the report I’m supposed to write on the Battle of Gettysburg … And in conclusion, people will probably keep fighting wars.” It’s … not a great technique. It’s what you do when you don’t actually have a thesis. And it’s essentially what Lucas Hnath is doing in Hillary and Clinton, a not particularly meaty exploration of the emotional life and logic behind a couple of particularly public figures. He starts by zooming way, way out: The always compelling Laurie Metcalf steps onstage in sweats, house lights still up, to talk to us about the universe. Somewhere far away, Tom Stoppard’s eye starts twitching as she begins the play by flipping a coin and ruminating about probability. She concludes that the universe is infinite and unpredictable, and therefore there must be “all kinds of planet Earths,” including a planet Earth “like this one but slightly different,” where there’s “a woman named Hillary … trying to become the president of a country called the United States of America.” We are to imagine this Hillary — like the one we know but, you know, on a different planet Earth — in 2008, in a New Hampshire hotel room on the eve of that state’s primary, nervously contemplating the fact that her numbers are slipping and her opponent, a guy called Barack (we never get his last name), is pulling ahead. And action. Hnath, who firmly warns actors against doing imitations of the real folks they’re playing, is attempting to clear our minds of everything we think we know — to “elevate these characters beyond a facile tabloid reality,” say his stage directions. But the path he’s chosen into the would-be-elevated world of his play feels a little easy-breezy, a first-thought-worst-thought kind of solution. His good fortune is to be reunited with Metcalf, the Tony-winning star of his 2017 hit A Doll’s House Part 2. As the big names of the play’s title, Metcalf and John Lithgow are the very watchable wind beneath its wings — but those wings are pretty rickety. Once we’ve all tacitly agreed to go somewhere else in the multiverse, Chloe Lamford’s backless white box of a set slides forward to encompass the play’s action, and director Joe Mantello does his best with the actors to deliver on the punny promise made in the show’s advertising: “Primarily a comedy.” But Hillary and Clinton isn’t really much of a comedy. It’s not much of a drama either. It’s four good actors giving bodies to a series of ideas that are, even if valid, pretty well chewed-over. Hillary was running on experience and ability, not personality. No matter what she did she was undermined, culturally stripped of her ability to show emotion and then judged for not having any, damned if she left Bill and damned if she stayed with him, trapped in a narrative that wanted her to be a mother when she was trying to be — and had every qualification to be — a leader. Vacillating between hangdog and ingratiating, Lithgow’s lanky Bill repeatedly encourages his wife to open up, to stop being so “cold and stubborn and guarded.” “People don’t like people who make them feel like shit,” he says, smiling. “How about if ‘people’ grow the fuck up?,” Hillary snaps in reply. It’s fun to listen to Metcalf fire off lines like this. She and Lithgow are so nimble, so at ease in themselves and such good listeners, that the play for the most part bobs along on the strength of their charisma. Playing Mark — Hillary’s dogged, long-suffering campaign manager, based on Mark Penn — Zak Orth also puts up a good fight. In Orth’s hands, Mark feels like a smart bear who’s been running for too long on a treadmill. He’s a little zhlubby and maybe not quite as on-the-pulse as he thinks, but he’s trying so hard and clearly means so well, and so it’s a genuinely ugly shocker when Hillary decides, during a high-stakes meet-up with Barack, to throw Mark under the bus. As Barack himself, Peter Francis James doesn’t fare quite so well, but you can hardly blame him. He’s been given a thankless part, more plot motivator than character. Because he’s far less developed than Hillary or Bill, avoiding an imitation becomes a harder task, and James doesn’t have much to do instead. Meanwhile, Mantello has him upstage himself for pretty much all of his one short scene. Hillary and Clinton isn’t really a political play. Like A Doll’s House Part 2, it’s a marriage play inside an attention-getting box. In Doll’s House, that box came together with its contents to form something fresh and fascinating, but here, the play’s best moments seem like just that — moments. Flashes of insight or feeling that don’t necessarily come together to provide significant new revelation into the figures of the title or into our relationship with them. The play wants to go deep, but it’s full of writerly sidesteps. During a prolonged shouting match between Mark and Bill, Hillary groans and lies down on the floor, her arm over her eyes. Hnath is most comfortable in dialogues, so he simply takes her out of the scene. Even the setting seems like a safe choice: We’re back in 2008, before the real shit hit the fan, because the play is only peripherally concerned with the real shit. It’s more concerned with the psychology of a husband and wife, and that’s the scale on which it makes its most effective observations.<doc-sep>
New York From “Julius Caesar” to “Abe Lincoln in Illinois” and beyond, theater has long given us fictionalized what-are-they-like-at-home glimpses of powerful politicians and their private lives. At their best, such shows can be both provocative and memorable, but the latest of them, Lucas Hnath’s “Hillary and Clinton,” takes a self-evidently promising subject and misses every opportunity to make it dramatic. No matter how you feel about the Clintons you’ll likely find it a once-over-lightly disappointment. Hillary and Clinton John Golden Theatre, 252 W. 45th St. $39-$159, 212-239-6200/800/432-7250, closes July 2 What is most puzzling about Mr. Hnath’s play is the episode from the Clintons’ shared life that he has chosen to put onstage. Instead of writing about the 2016 election, he’s turned the clock all the way back to 2008, the year in which Mrs. Clinton ( Laurie Metcalf ) lost the Democratic presidential nomination to Barack Obama ( Peter Francis James ). What’s more, he’s sought to write what the marquee cutely describes as “primarily a comedy,” although that catchphrase is misleading: Shorn of its limp punchlines, “Hillary and Clinton” is the story of the complicated, apparently unhappy marriage of two formidably ambitious people, one of whom usually got what he wanted and the other of whom mostly didn’t. As promising as this sounds on paper, it doesn’t work in the theater, in part because John Lithgow is playing Bill Clinton. Granted that theater is an art of illusion and that Mr. Hnath has very specifically instructed his actors not to “imitate” (his word) the people they’re playing, but Mr. Lithgow’s familiar onstage persona, that of the comic WASP, is so far removed from Mr. Clinton’s down-home glad-handing that you spend much of the play wondering who thought it was a smart idea to cast him. Nor does it help that Mr. James hits the center of the bull’s-eye—you buy him as soon as he makes his first entrance and starts talking. Ms. Metcalf’s performance, by contrast, is nothing like an imitation, but it’s still believable in its own chilly, hard-surfaced way. What is at no time believable is the dialogue. I realize that Mr. Hnath is trying to write a character study, not a here’s-how-it-really-works drama à la “The Best Man.” Nevertheless, I found it impossible to credit his version of the relationship between his fictionalized Clintons, especially when Bill plays the pity card and tries to coax a bit of warmth out of his understandably suspicious spouse. “Can I touch you? It’s been so long,” he tells her shortly after his first entrance, a line that is the stuff unintended laughter is made of. When not frankly incredible, “Hillary and Clinton” is painfully arty, above all in the opening and closing speeches, in which Mrs. Clinton speculates about the existence of “an infinite number of planet earths” on which other Clintons are living parallel but different lives. Taking a cue from their tone, Joe Mantello and Chloe Lamford, the director and set designer, have situated the play in an antiseptic space that looks like a giant Louise Nevelson sculpture in a white wooden frame. Again, it’s easy to see what they had in mind, given that Mr. Hnath makes his imaginary Mrs. Clinton declare that “feelings are a terrible reason for doing anything,” but it’d be hard to get any more obvious. Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic, is the author, most recently, of “Billy and Me.” Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.