There’s a long and storied tradition of documentary or verbatim theater, which pulls from the transcripts of actual testimony and interviews to portray the essence of an historic moment. The Ford/Hill Project juxtaposes two such pivotal moments, when women stepped forward with allegations of sexual harassment or assault against men seeking elevation to the U.S. Supreme Court. Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford offered clear-eyed, unapologetic testimony of their experiences with Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh — though in both cases their accounts were dismissed as the two men won easy confirmation to the nation’s highest court.
Actress Elizabeth Marvel, working with director Lee Sunday Evans, has fashioned a script that ping-pongs back and forth between the two confirmation hearings, underscoring the similarities in Hill and Ford’s accounts and the methods in which unnamed senators sought to undermine their credibility. The material is both fascinating and deliberately infuriating, but the format of the show itself can be equally confounding — I suspect even more so for theatergoers who were too young to experience these news events firsthand.
For instance, we learn nothing about the grown-up Ford beyond the fact that she is a professor of some sort, knowledgeable about the chemical processes behind human memory formation in her explanation of how she can remember so clearly a fateful encounter with a drunken teenage Kavanaugh in a suburban bedroom when she was 15. Knowing that she’s a psychology professor and biostatistician of some renown might have bolstered our trust in her when when she says her teenage recollections are based on how the brain’s “neurotransmitter encodes memories into the hippocampus.”
There’s also a kind of willy-nilly swapping of roles throughout the 70-minute show, with Hill portrayed both by Gabby Beans as well as Teagle F. Bougere (who gets the bulk of Thomas’s blustering defense) while Marvel shares Ford’s lines with Josh Hamilton (who nails Kavanaugh’s blubbering bro-ishness and repeated insistence that he just likes beer). All four take turns as the questioning senators, who prop up the case for one side or the other. At several moments, one actor shifts suddenly from interrogator to witness — a device that, while not ultimately confusing, does little to illuminate our understanding of the situation.
Another gambit to underscore the authenticity of the script is equally puzzling. At the top of the show, we see the cast load up portable listening devices with earphones feeding them the actual testimony of their subjects, which they replicate pretty much verbatim, with all the ums and stutter-stops intact. Beans seemed the least comfortable with this approach, or perhaps Hill spoke with more verbal stumbles in her testimony than the others. But again, what does this add to our understanding of the material?
What does stand out is the plausibility of Hill and Ford’s testimony, an idea that is reinforced by the calm, understated performances of Marvel and Beans. Both bring a restraint borne of intelligence, with Beans’s Hill making careful distinctions like an experienced lawyer and Marvel’s Ford drawing on her scientific background to outline the parameters of what she does and does not remember. Evans’s production boasts a spare elegance, as the cast move around nine wooden slat back chairs that underscore the stakes of the dialogue.
The show also captures just how easy it was to minimize or ignore the testimony of women, and how little changed in the nearly three decades between the two confirmation hearings. One notable difference is the demeanor of the future justices, and how quick the mantle of victimhood could be shifted to them instead of the women they (allegedly) wronged. While Bougere’s Thomas offers an eloquent denunciation of Hill’s accusations and the “high-tech lynching” he feels resulted from the hearing, Hamilton’s Kavanaugh emerges as a petulant child of privilege rendered almost speechless by the thought that anyone would cast negative aspersions on his drunken teenage years. We hear about Kavanaugh’s two other accusers only in passing, and nothing at all about how a high school friend of Ford’s who initially corroborated her testimony later recanted. The show may not endorse the “Believe all women” mantra, but it clearly lands firmly on the side of these two women.
The Thomas and Kavanaugh confirmations remain messy, complicated affairs, both colored by our knowledge of what the two women did (and didn’t do) in the years since. (Not to mention the key decisions by the two justices on an increasingly right-wing court.) Both women published memoirs while resuming their academic careers, but neither seems to have capitalized on their 15 minutes of fame to the extent that that emerges as a key motivation for going public with their accusations. Why would they lie?, The Ford/Hill Project repeatedly asks, especially when stepping forward brings all manner of public opprobrium and even death threats. The show concludes with another question, unasked but lingering unmistakably in the air: When will we listen? ★★★☆☆
THE FORD/HILL PROJECT
BAM Fisher, Brooklyn
Running time: 1 hour, 10 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through Sept. 20 for $45 to $55