Impeachment Saga: Are You Ready for the Musical? : Stage. A spate of productions capitalizes on the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and its fallout.

The first lady, on the verge of a crackup, wails, “I want to feel vulnerable! . . . I wanna be like Tipper. I want to unravel.” Her husband reluctantly agrees to counseling, as long as the therapist makes house calls. When Mrs. Shrunk shows up in the Oval Office for the first session, the first couple charms her with an up-tempo ditty called “They Don’t Inhale at Yale.”

This is what’s known as a reprise.

All that impeachment business supposedly was behind us as we collectively healed, wasn’t it? But, just in time for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Next Act, several New York-based playwrights are again trotting out those unforgettable, archetypal characters: In one production, Kenneth Starr is surrounded by reels of tape, binoculars and a periscope; in another, Slick Willie croons, “We didn’t come this far / To get our hands caught in the cookie jar” and his brainy, blond wife wonders where it’s all gone wrong.

“The Last Temptation of William Jefferson,” a musical comedy at the waayyy-off-Broadway Castillo Theatre in SoHo, opens next month. “Starr’s Last Tape,” a one-man show written by two veteran editors at The Nation magazine, premiered this week at the Broadway Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge, Mass., for five sold-out performances.

They’re the latest theatrical examinations of the nation’s long-running domestic and political drama--following the New Dramatists’ staged readings of Monica Lewinsky’s grand jury testimony earlier this year in New York--and they may not be the last.

“I can see why people would be plenty interested,” says Todd London, New Dramatists’ artistic director. “Theater allows us to see the masks and the people behind the masks.”

In “Starr’s Last Tape,” the independent counsel--in an unspecified location, though his orange jumpsuit offers a clue--reviews a massive tape collection as he composes his memoirs. The title came first, says Victor Navasky, who was dually inspired by “the absurd existentialism of [Samuel] Beckett’s ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’ and the absurd existentialism of the Starr investigation.”

He and colleague Richard Lingeman wrote the one-act satire last summer, figuring “it had a shelf life of about 10 minutes,” Navasky said. It bounced around town until a friend passed it to Kate Maguire, the Berkshire Festival’s producing director, who said, “I sat and read it and laughed out loud, and that’s usually the first sign this play may be good.”

The show stars the appropriately pale, balding Los Angeles actor Brian Reddy. While he’s the only person onstage, many others--the Clintons, Linda Tripp, a phone sex operator, Barry Goldwater--appear via tape. By now, Navasky’s convinced the subject remains current because “Starr’s never going to go away. And the issues he represents are going to be with us for a long, long time.”

Giving Events a ‘Human Face’

Meanwhile, at a rehearsal at New York’s tiny Castillo Theatre, Elizabeth Saliers, playing a first lady named Melanie, and Bill Quinlan as the drawling William Jefferson are telling their therapist about their nearly 30-year “open marriage,” their love of risk-taking (“You and I were Bonnie and Clyde with law degrees,” Melanie keens) and their growing disenchantment with politics.

Playwright-lyricist-director Fred Newman, 64, is a therapist who presides over nonprofit organizations that variously provide therapy, stage his politically themed dramas, run youth programs and publish his books. He’s even got a weekend radio call-in show called “Let’s Develop.”

Watching the impeachment crisis at full boil, he reacted shrinkishly: “I was struck by the demonization, how this story’s been made into something that denies that, bottom line, these are human beings, real people. I was struck by the callousness. . . . I wanted to write a play that gave them a human face.”

So here are Bill and Melanie, two Yale Law grads seeking professional help, backed by a singing, dancing chorus of four. The name Clinton never actually appears, but it’s clear from the text and the poster (showing a condom-sheathed Washington Monument) who its subjects are, just as it’s clear that Newman wishes the real first couple had seen a therapist. “It’s a little presumptuous,” he says hesitantly, “but, well, I think it might be useful.”

The one theater piece that a campaigning Hillary Clinton needn’t fear running into is New Dramatists’ “The Trials of Monica Lewinsky.” The first staged reading, drawn verbatim from the grand jury testimony, was presented last fall, when few Americans had yet heard the young woman’s voice. Taking material from Starr’s report on the Internet, the group collected a cast of 10 in what was intended as a one-night stand, an experiment to see whether theater could humanize this unknown figure.

The production was tapped in March by the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo. Festival producer Lou Viola found the reading “tragically funny. The humor came from the fact that you could not believe it; it was inconceivable that these conversations were being held at this level of government. . . . It was so scary you had to laugh.”

The New Dramatists ended their evening with Lewinsky preparing for her Barbara Walters interview, followed by the book, the tour--so much for the theater’s role in piercing mystery.

So while other theater folk may still grapple with the questions raised by the Lewinsky mess, the New Dramatists are finished with the subject.

“By the time we were done,” London says cheerfully, “I think I and everyone else never wanted to hear her name again.”