Just when it seemed that Bill and Hillary Clinton had finally left the national stage, along comes a play by a liberal producer that examines an “American dynasty in crisis” about a “power couple who have been a prominent part of the American political landscape for the past quarter-century.”
Hillary and Clinton will debut on Broadway next spring and will star actors Laurie Metcalf and John Lithgow in the title roles while exploring potential behind-the-scenes developments during the 2008 Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire.
According to an exclusive article written by David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter, the production explores what might have happened differently when the Clintons clashed over “whether bringing in the former president“ would be a liability or an asset in that year’s “troubled campaign” to win the White House.
Scripted by playwright Lucan Hnath, the play has an unnamed character: liberal opponent Barack Obama, who is only referred to as “The Other Guy.”
Rooney also noted that the production examines “the knotty complexities and gender dynamics of marriage, touching on the limitations of experience and inevitability in its timely look at an American dynasty in crisis.”
“Hillary and Clinton premiered at Chicago's Victory Gardens Theater in 2016,” he added, but it has been “substantially reworked since then and now bears little resemblance to that earlier version.”
Liberal producer Scott Rudin stated:
It's a political play -- but not in the way I think anybody will expect. It treats the Clintons like Shakespeare treated real people in his history plays.
It is both fundamentally truthful and also wildly imaginative.
“It's not in any way a docudrama or a work of nonfiction” Rudin added, “but rather an exploration of power and how it works, not only in the canvas of a political campaign but inside an enduring marriage.”
The producer then described the play as “funny and smart and intensely theatrical and, I think, very moving.”
“It has that particular kind of energy of the best backstage dramas,” he continued before stating that the production is “a deep dive into a pivotal moment we think we know a lot about, but that in fact we actually know very little about.”
The liberal producer then asserted:
It feels like the theater is finally delivering what, at its best, only the theater can deliver -- a vigorous, tough-minded conversation about right now, a response to how we live and what it means to be in the world we are in, and an actual open-hearted theatrical argument about the state of our particular nation.
We haven't had it for so long, and it was once the baseline of what Broadway could and did offer so brilliantly.
As NewsBusters previously reported, this isn’t the first time Rudin has supported a project that promoted liberal ideology.
Five years ago, he helped produce Rosewater, a film about abducted former Newsweek reporter Maziar Bahari that was directed by former Daily Show host Jon Stewart.
As a result, Stewart received a “hero’s welcome” during the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado for the movie, which got its title from the nickname that Bahari assigned to his interrogator.
At the time, Hollywood Reporter columnist Scott Feinberg praised Stewart as “one of the most trusted men in America” and hailed the project as “an attempt to get people to eat their vegetables (to learn and care more about the world around them) by hiding them in their ice cream.”
“It’s not Oscar bait, but we do love his Obama-friendly TV show,” Feinberg also noted.
And if there was any doubt about Broadway’s political leanings, that should have been put to rest in late July, when Hillary Clinton received “a standing ovation” while attending a performance of Hello, Dolly!
At the time, performer Bette Midler stated that Clinton’s visit made everyone in attendance “unbelievably happy.”
It's always interesting when liberal Democrats compare something they've written today with anything produced by William Shakespeare. Surely the "Bard of Avon" set a higher standard than that.
