Will Keen, Billy Howle, Lesley Manville in Ghosts at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Photo Credit: Stephanie Berger.

As Hillary Clinton declared herself a candidate for the presidency in 2016, the New York stage echoed with a witty synchronicity: Three productions that opened within a few days of her campaign launch provided arch commentary on it. In the lavish Broadway play Wolf Hall Parts One and Two, Off-Broadway’s frolicsome satire Clinton the Musical, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s production of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, the boards resounded with the footsteps of adulterous charmers, lupine predators, and rulers who couldn’t keep their scepters in their pants. Lines of dialogue blur together. I ask my notebook, was it in Ghosts or Wolf Hall that we learn “pain through love is the purifying fire which those who love generously know”? Neither, it turns out: the line is uttered by the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt in Clinton the Musical. “I’ll tell you this: it was me who pushed him along on his good days, and I carried the whole business on my back when he was off womanizing or wallowing in misery and self-pity”? Sounds like Hillary Clinton, but, no, it’s Helene speaking of her dead husband Captain Alving in Ghosts. When, in the Clinton show, Hillary asks “How could you do that to me?” and her husband replies, “You’re going to have to be more specific,” it could just as well be