No, Hillary & Monica is not a two-character play about a meeting between Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Lewinsky, the White House intern who got it on with the president. It’s about a couple of comedy writers who are trying to write just such a play, on the assumption that it will hit big with the public. Working from that dubious premise, playwrights Victor Hardack and Edward Michael Bell struggle mightily to make Hillary & Monica work. They give their two main characters, Ben Rose (Barry Pearl) and Pete Raffelo (Rick Pasqualone), lots of jokes to crack as they attempt to thrash out a storyline. Director Joel Zwick also pumps up the action as best he can, calling for fast and loud dialogue and a pace that resembles a French farce. But all the sound and fury goes for naught, done in by the thinness of the narrative, the problems of believability and contrivance. Hillary & Monica is set in the present, which makes Ben and Pete worry about the viability of their play: would the hard-charging Hillary allow it to be produced while she campaigns for the presidency? For an answer to that question, they call in their lawyer, Greg Goldfarb (Phil Morris), who is every bit a wise-guy as they are, quick with the jokes and quips. He also thinks they’re nuts for even thinking of revisiting the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal. There are further complications, of course. Although Ben and Pete were once a successful writing team, they haven’t worked together in over a year. They are also geographically challenged: Ben lives in Manhattan, Pete, the alien territory of New Jersey. Additionally, Pete is a gambling-addict whose debts have brought the IRS and the bookies down on him. He also has a health problem which becomes a huge (and all-too-sudden) plot point. The fourth character is Ben’s blasé girlfriend, Tiffany (Rena Strober), who uses her sexual power to drive both Ben and Pete up the wall. All of this has the feeling of a sit-com episode masquerading as a full-length play, but that’s not to say there aren’t choice comic moments, especially when the movie-obsessed Ben channels Lena Horne and Simon & Garfunkel. But, unfortunately, moments do not a play make.
