Hillary Clinton Is Coming to Broadway. As a Character in a Play.

The playwright Lucas Hnath made his Broadway debut last year with a drama starring Laurie Metcalf in an imagined sequel for one of the most famous women in theater history, Nora Helmer of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House.”

Next year, Hnath will return to Broadway with a drama starring Metcalf in an imagined alternate universe for one of the most famous women in politics: Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“Hillary and Clinton” is a play that depicts a 2008 evening in which a presidential candidate named Hillary Clinton, struggling in Iowa against a more charismatic opponent, calls on her husband for help. The play will be the first with Hillary Clinton as a protagonist to reach Broadway (a musical featuring a fictionalized Clinton, called “Soft Power,” had a production in Los Angeles and San Francisco this year and is being revised for the Public Theater, which is off-Broadway).

Metcalf, who won a Tony Award last year for her role in Hnath’s “A Doll’s House, Part 2,” and another one this year in Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women,” will star opposite John Lithgow, also a two-time Tony winner, for “The Changing Room” and “Sweet Smell of Success.” The play will be directed by Joe Mantello.

The play will begin previews on March 6 and open April 18. The theater has not been announced.

“Hillary and Clinton” was first staged in 2016 — when the real Clinton was on her way to becoming the Democratic nominee for president — at the Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago. Critical response varied — in the Chicago Tribune, Chris Jones called it “an audacious, whip-smart, highly entertaining piece of writing,” but in The New York Times, Charles Isherwood said the play “doesn’t venture far enough.”

There have been productions since at the Philadelphia Theater Co., at HATTheater in Richmond, Virginia, and at the Second Thought Theater in Dallas. In each of those productions, as in the one in Chicago, “Hillary” was played by an African-American woman.

In the years since the play was written and first staged, Clinton lost the 2016 presidential race to Donald Trump, and Hnath made an auspicious Broadway debut — his play “A Doll’s House Part 2” was a critical success and is now the most-produced play (other than Shakespeare and Christmas standards) in America. He is now revising “Hillary and Clinton” for the New York production.

“Hillary and Clinton” is to be the fifth play this season produced on Broadway by Scott Rudin, who is also producing “Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus,” “King Lear,” “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Waverly Gallery.”