Lucas Hnath Imagines Scenarios for ‘Hillary and Clinton’ — and Gets Them Right

When Lucas Hnath started writing his play “Hillary and Clinton,” it was 2008. Barack Obama had not yet been elected for his presidency, Hillary Clinton was at work on the campaign trail for the first time and Donald Trump as commander in chief was but a punchline. Hnath, still young and full of impish distraction, wrote the entire thing, then ditched it and moved on to his next project. Eight years later, while Clinton tried for a second shot at being POTUS, the associate artistic director of Playwrights Horizons and Hnath’s friend Adam Greenfield read “Hillary and Clinton,” and was intrigued. He sent the play to the artistic director of Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago Chay Yew, and they did the first production. Then producer Scott Rudin came along. He wanted to option “Hillary and Clinton” to appear on Broadway in New York. “I told him, ‘It’s a play that’s very old,’” explains Hnath on a recent afternoon. He’s sitting at one of the tables covered by a red-and-white-checkered cloth inside the Broadway institution Sardi’s. Caricature drawings of actors — both from film and the stage — line the walls, and waiters wear all-white with aprons. He points out Nathan Lane’s picture,

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