On March 16th, the play “Hillary and Clinton” had its first preview, at the Golden Theatre, on West Forty-fifth Street. Its author, Lucas Hnath, knew the Golden well, because his work “A Doll’s House, Part 2,” a bold and witty sequel to the Ibsen drama, had played there less than two years earlier, and he had attended more than a dozen of the performances. Nevertheless, he wasn’t sure where to sit at the “Hillary” performance. “I still haven’t found a spot I like in that theatre,” he had complained to me, in an e-mail that day. “I’ll get there early and scope out a few options.”

Hnath, whose surname is pronounced “Nayth,” was excited to witness an audience responding to the actors, the actors to the audience, and both to what he had written. “I can’t fully hear the play without the audience,” he told me. A compulsive fiddler, he rewrites line after line practically until opening night. “I get futzy,” he explained. Hnath makes his antic changes with enough brio that they become a source of energy to the actors in his productions. “Did he tell you about his scraps?” Laurie Metcalf, who starred in “A Doll’s House, Part 2” and plays Hillary in the new production, asked me. “They’re all brilliant. And he has a ton of them.”

Whereas some playwrights aim to produce solid works of literature that just happen to need actors, Hnath writes fluid works that, through the honing process of performance, become art. He is unusually open to suggestion but also protective of his vision. Scott Rudin, who produced both “A Doll’s House, Part 2” and “Hillary and Clinton,” told me, “If you ask him to do something that he feels is untruthful, it’ll come back at you like a boomerang. He has an enormous capacity to take in a good idea and to repel a lousy one.”

“Hillary and Clinton” isn’t Hnath’s only new production of the season. On March 7th, his play “The Thin Place” had its première, at the Actors Theatre of Louisville. (It comes to New York this fall, at Playwrights Horizons.) This past winter, Hnath spent Mondays and Tuesdays in Manhattan and the rest of the week in Kentucky. “Honestly, I can’t remember which play is which!” he said, on Skype one day, from a hotel room in Louisville. He seemed worried that he wouldn’t have enough time to polish either “Hillary and Clinton” or “The Thin Place” to his satisfaction.

Fortunately, the backbones of both plays had been in place for a while. “Hillary and Clinton” focusses on the moment in the 2008 Democratic primary campaign, after the Iowa caucuses, when Hillary Clinton first fell behind Barack Obama. Hillary desperately wants success, but the key question, as in many Hnath plays, is how far she will go to achieve it. Two impulses compete in her head, personified by the two men who want to steer her campaign. On one side is Mark Penn, the veteran operative, who, in Hnath’s telling, urges her to make the unsexy pitch that she is the most qualified candidate. At the other extreme is her husband, the former President, who is intuitive, undisciplined, and over the hill. He reminds her that when she teared up recently, at a gathering of women at a diner, the public was touched. For him, forging emotional bonds with voters is paramount.

Hillary, like Nora Helmer, still loves the man she needed when she was younger, but the tether has loosened. In Bill’s case, the older he gets the more he loves and needs Hillary. The hallmark of a Hnath script is robust argument, but these debates are always infused by the stormy relationships around them:

Bill: You are missing an opportunity here to take the thing that I do well and use it to your advantage. When I ran, I won. Hillary: Oh—! Going there are we— Bill: All I mean is—what I’m saying is— Hillary: If you were running today, you wouldn’t win. Especially against him. You wouldn’t have a chance. Bill: He is me.

“Hillary and Clinton” is a new version of a script that Hnath wrote in 2008, when Hillary seemed likely to win the Democratic nomination. The play was first performed in Chicago, in April, 2016, when she again seemed poised to win it. Updating a play with such heavy political contrails was tricky: by 2019, the American political ecosystem had drastically shifted a third time. “I knew this play was dead on arrival if it even winked at Trump,” Hnath said.

Nor does “Hillary and Clinton” have the zippy sentimentalism of something like “The West Wing.” Hnath resists blunt appeals to emotion—the easy laugh or cry that resolves tension. Although his play was inspired by the Clintons, it is pointedly not a Broadway version of a bio-pic. Reality becomes a springboard for a roundelay of ideas. “I’ve always been suspicious of feelings,” Hnath said, adding, “Hillary’s voice is very much me.” Rudin told me, “Hnath’s theatrical language looks like naturalism, walks like naturalism, talks like naturalism, but it’s not naturalism.”

“The Thin Place,” drafted last year, is the story of a young woman with apparent occult abilities who befriends an older, professional psychic. In Part 1, the psychic confesses that she’s a fake—her work is just supposed to make people feel better—but the younger woman makes it frightfully clear that not everyone in the field sees themselves as a phony. One of the challenges of “The Thin Place,” Hnath told me, was similar to that of “Hillary and Clinton”: to make the audience uncertain whether what they were seeing onstage was “real” or pretend. They had to stay uncomfortable in their seats, as at a horror film.

Hnath is a master of Socratic dialogue, a disciple of George Bernard Shaw by way of Wallace Shawn. Hnath credits Shawn’s plays with teaching him how to make an unpalatable argument feel palatable for long enough that the audience “nods along to something that is questionable.” Hnath admires Shaw’s essays, but when it comes to theatre he feels a greater affinity for the Greeks. “I love the stripped-down approach that they had,” he said. “Someone will come forward and make an uninterrupted argument, and then someone else will come forward and make a different argument.” In “Isaac’s Eye,” from 2013, Isaac Newton and his scientific elder Robert Hooke spar over the nature of light. In Hnath’s breakout play, “The Christians,” from 2014, a doubting pastor tries to persuade his angry parishioners that a person can have faith without believing in Hell. In a Hnath play, you repeatedly find yourself agreeing with a pointed speech, then agreeing with its rebuttal. In “A Doll’s House, Part 2,” Nora prophesies the death of marriage, telling the family maid, “How sad it is that we put ourselves through this completely unnecessary process of self-torture. Twenty, thirty years from now people will have many spouses in a life, even many spouses at once.” The maid responds, “Maybe there’s a reason why things are the way they are, why men are the way they are and women are the way they are.” Many playwrights promote the beleaguered liberal values of tolerance and skepticism, but Hnath enacts them onstage. This, you feel, is what it means to think something through.