Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre’s ‘Bill Clinton Hercules’ offers a candid look at 42nd president

It all started with an offhand comment on the way to the airport.

In December of 2010, Bob Paisley produced the first edition of what he called the British Invasion through his production company, Central Standard Theatre. He had invited several British theater artists — Guy Masterson, Rebecca Vaughan and Gavin Robertson, among others — to perform solo and two-character plays for Kansas City theatergoers.

It amounted to a minifestival that showcased gifted performers executing material written by the actors or by others. All in all, it represented a high level of craftsmanship — and something new and refreshing on KC’s cultural landscape. Then it became an annual event.

When it was time for everyone to go home, and Paisley offered his friend Masterson a ride to the Northland to catch a flight.

“It was just off the cuff,” Masterson said recently via Skype. “He said something along the lines of he’d like to find a one-man show and I said, ‘You could do worse than a one-man show about Bill Clinton.’”

At that point, though, there was no one-man play about the 42nd president.

Many of the British artists Paisley has invited to Kansas City specialize in shows about historical figures. Vaughan’s repertoire, for example, includes a piece on Elizabeth I. Pip Utton has written shows on Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler. Ross Gurney-Randal performs solo plays about Henry VIII and Benito Mussolini. But there are few shows about contemporary political leaders.

That could have been the end of it. But years later Masterson — an actor who produces, directs, writes and runs his own touring company in the U.K. — came across a previously ignored email from Rachel Mariner, an American lawyer and playwright living in Britain.

She had written a play about predatory lending she hoped Masterson would produce, but then Masterson found out she’d been part of Clinton’s legal defense team after Paula Jones sued him for sexual harassment, a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court.

So Masterson suggested: Why not write a play about the president?

“I’ve got the perfect actor for it,” Masterson told her.

That was the beginning of “Bill Clinton Hercules,” which Paisley performed under Masterson’s direction last year at the Edinburgh Fringe festival in Scotland and in April on a quick tour of Northern Ireland. This week he performs the piece in Kansas City for the first time.

“Finding a through-line into Bill Clinton and why you’d want to put on a play about Bill Clinton was the key,” Masterson continued. “And so we effectively entered into an agreement where she would be the lead writer and I would sort of be the dramaturg. And we thrashed about with ideas for about a year until we came up with this structure.”

Paisley said there’s a list of about 20 books considered Clinton’s favorites. And one of them is “The Cure at Troy,” a verse drama by Irish poet Seamus Heaney adapted from “Philoctetes” by Sophocles.

Mariner’s script, Masterson said, is “loosely based on Heaney’s play, or the characters in it, which are a metaphor for the various types of personality that Bill Clinton is. And so he illustrates the stories of his life through the parallels with the characters in ‘The Cure at Troy.’ And of course the character of Hercules, the hero that makes things happen, is the guy he always wanted to be and sometimes was.”

It was Clinton as Hercules, Masterson said, who brokered a peace agreement between Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin and the PLO’s Yasser Arafat and influenced a peace deal between unionists and nationalists in Northern Ireland.

“He’s very, very candid. and it’s important to realize that this is a character,” Masterson said. “While Bob obviously carries a striking resemblance to Bill and they both have charisma and charm, this is not a straight impersonation. It’s a postulation on what Bill might say if he was completely honest. He realizes how far from his ideal character he’s allowed himself to become. He’s realized that maybe the world isn’t what he wanted it to be. And he takes some of the blame for himself.”

Paisley said there was a lot of pressure before the show opened last year at the Edinburgh festival. For one thing, Mariner had written about 80 minutes of material while the festival allowed only a 70-minute slot. After the festival, Paisley, Masterson and Mariner reshaped the material. The current version will run about 85 minutes.

Paisley said Mariner and Masterson did the hard work of writing, while interpreting the material fell to him.

“I am just the pretty,” he said. “That’s my job. At the same time, we all contributed to this play. We have a writer very familiar with the material and a director who’s been involved in something like 50 one-man shows.”

Paisley said “Bill Clinton Hercules” was well-received in Northern Ireland.

“Clinton is very, very well-respected over there because of his involvement in settling the troubles and getting various parties to the peace process,” Paisley said. “So it was a little daunting playing someone so respected over there. It was a thrill and an honor to do it.”

And from the it’s a small world department, he received a positive review from Sean Hillen, who was once a reporter for the Kansas City Times.

Paisley said he assumes the play will have a life up to the 2016 presidential election, after which it’s possible that Clinton will become the first man to be married to a woman president. Paisley hopes to arrange additional performances in the U.S. and overseas before the election.

“That play is not all that theatrical,” Paisley said. “It’s more like a TED talk. It could be done almost anywhere. It’s a simple piece that could be done in a lot of different places. I think there are some possibilities that it can have a life.”

Masterson, for his part, thinks the play will retain its relevance, regardless of the outcome of next year’s elections.

“If you can have a one-man play about Mussolini you can certainly have a one-man play about Bill Clinton,” Masterson said. “There are very few people who have the qualities Bob has that make him ideal to play Bill Clinton. So I hope it’s something he can continue to do.”

After performing for sympathetic audiences in Northern Ireland and Scotland, Paisley said he’s curious to see how some of his Republican friends may respond to the show.

“This is not a saintly portrait of Bill Clinton,” he said. “It’s bipartisan and even-handed and that was our point from the beginning. He did some really good things and he made some really stupid mistakes. The place where we find ourselves today, with the disparity between wealthy and poor, he says: ‘I can point to a place where I helped that happen.’”

Masterson said he believes Mariner’s play offers an unusually complex portrait.

“The play is much bigger than Bill’s mistakes,” said Masterson, who holds dual citizenship in the U.S. and the U.K. “You’re left thinking that this is a man, who, despite all his weaknesses, was one of the good guys and really wanted the best for the people of America, not just for himself. It’s about as true a rags-to-riches story as you can get.”

This story was originally published May 3, 2015 at 3:00 AM with the headline "Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre’s ‘Bill Clinton Hercules’ offers a candid look at 42nd president."