'Hillary and Clinton': Mild amusement, mild insights

So you say you haven't had enough politics. Well, have I got the show for you! Take a break from the bloggers and the pundits, the TV and the newspapers, and go to the theater! Hillary and Clinton, Philadelphia Theatre Company's last production of their season, couldn't be better timed - or worse, depending on your appetite for politics.

In Lucas Hnath's mildly amusing, mildly insightful play is a parody of two particularly famous figures, living in pre-election 2008 in some parallel universe where these Clintons are not exactly our Clintons, but close enough to be caricatures. And The Other Guy is about to win the nomination for the presidency.

In a hotel room in New Hampshire, there is much strategizing. Hillary (Alice M. Gatling) is meeting with her campaign manager (Todd Cerveris). The Other Guy (Lindsay Smiling) is about to offer her the vice presidential slot. And in walks Bill (John Procaccino), uninvited, upsetting everyone and every plan everyone has made. This Bill is feeling old and needy, but he's still got the boyish charm and the political moxy. He knows his wife and he knows the electorate, and he knows that we want a humanizing "story," the teary eye, the flaw, the momentary faltering. Which is exactly what Hnath gives us in this play.

Pretending to be a behind-the-scenes portrait of how a power couple's marriage works, the play seems to me to be a parody, not only of the Clintons but also of us, the American public. All we want, apparently, is the person behind the candidate, the personality, the soap operatic view. Current campaign ads and analyses would seem to support this.

Gatling's acting task as Hillary seems the most difficult, in that Hillary's private personality, like her public personality, seems unknowable and ambiguous. This is problematic, since Hnath gives her the central role, both as a character and as our narrator.

Hnath's Bill gives Procaccino much opportunity for posturing and fun (maybe rather too much fun): This Bill is too feckless, too slouchy, too self-indulgent, too puppyish, too irresistible. As Mark, Cerveris nicely reveals the hopelessness of being at loggerheads with Bill, a contest he is bound to lose. And The Other Guy is so "reasonable" as to seem "constipated," another easy caricature that leads nowhere.

Hnath, as we recently saw in his much heftier play The Christians, specializes in monologues, especially monologues about ethical and moral dilemmas; his characters each get a chance to hold forth, uninterrupted. Hillary and Clinton ultimately withholds both solutions and resolution, falling back on an easy evasion: the enormity of time and space as they dwarf human problems. Meanwhile, here on Earth it will soon be November.

Through June 26 at Philadelphia Theatre Company, Suzanne Roberts Theatre, Broad & Lombard Sts. Tickets: $25-$62. Information: 215-985-0420 or philadelphiatheatrecompany.org.