Lucas Hnath's 2008 play "Hillary and Clinton" is billed as a comedy about the presidential race between a fictional "Hillary Clinton" and "Barack Obama," and it gets off to a promising start.

Standing outside a glowing white box, Laurie Metcalf takes a hand-held microphone and explains that if the universe is infinite, then every event has happened over and over, just in a slightly different way. "So then imagine, okay, that light years away from here on one of those other planet earths that's like this one, but slightly different, that there's a woman named Hillary." 

That's the set-up for what follows, but by the end of the play, this statement seems more cover-your-behind legalese than a prediction of what we'll experience, since nothing truly weird happens in "Hillary and Clinton" — the play hews pretty close to the facts of the 2008 presidential election, though it does imagine conversations among the Clintons (Metcalf and John Lithgow, both wonderful), her campaign advisor Mark (Zak Orth) and Barack (an appropriately cool Peter Francis James) in a sparsely furnished hotel room in New Hampshire. All this means that those in the audience who paid attention to the news that year will already know what's about to happen on stage the moment they step in the theater.

People who are obsessed with the Clinton's marriage, who wonder why she stayed with him, who ruminate about why she made some of the campaign decisions she did, will find a lot to like and wrangle with. It's a "maybe it happened this way" kind of history. There is even a moment late in the play, when Hillary explodes over the ways in which it's tougher to be a female candidate, that seems particularly relevant today as we look at those running for the 2020 Democratic nomination.

But despite all the talent on stage and behind the scenes — the estimable Joe Mantello directs — there's very little insight or even entertainment here. Even though Lithgow and Metcalf develop "Bill" and "Hillary" as fresh characters instead of tired impressions, we're not left with a deeper understanding of either of them. Perhaps that's because Hillary's public and private life has been already analyzed ad nauseum in the media. We know who she is, the struggles she's faced, the decisions she's made. Whether it's worth seeing them reenacted over the course of 90 minutes on a stage depends on whether you're a fan.

"Hillary and Clinton" by Lucas Hnath, directed by Joe Mantello at the Golden Theatre.