Off-B'way Review: The Ford/Hill Project

Elizabeth Marvel and Gabby Beans in
The Ford/Hill Project,
Credit: Rebecca Smeyne

A docu-play made up of verbatim Senate testimony? Doesn’t exactly sound riveting. Yet The Ford/Hill Project, now at BAM’s Fishman Space after regional productions and a run at the Under the Radar Festival, provides a searing portrait of the workings of government power and its failure to deal with violence and harassment against women. Elizabeth Marvel (one of four cast members) and Lee Sunday Evans (who directs) have stitched together the most dramatic excerpts of testimony and questions from the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominees Clarence Thomas in 1991 and Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. Both high-profile events were rocked by the respective eyewitness accounts of Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford, both of whom claimed the nominees mistreated them. 

Hill testified Thomas pressured her to date him and then, when she refused, used lewd, pornographic language and innuendo in front of her when they worked together at the US Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Ford claimed Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a party when they were in high school. At the time of both hearings, the accusations made headlines and threatened the Republican nominees’ appointment to the highest court in the land. Both vehemently denied the allegations and were eventually successfully confirmed. With the passage of time, the impact of these events has faded, but this intense distillation of Hill and Ford’s stories and Thomas and Kavanuagh’s insistent denials bring them vividly into focus.

Teagle F. Bougere, Elizabeth Marvel,
Josh Hamilton and Gabby Beans
in The Ford/Hill Project,
Credit: Rebecca Smeyne

The quartet of actors which also includes Gabby Beans, Teagle F. Bougere and Josh Hamilton, play multiple roles, switching sides from Senators to witnesses and from male to female. At times the women play Ford and Hill, then the men enact them. The actresses trade from playing the accusing women to the cross-examining Committee members. The set is a semi-circle of red chairs which the actors re-arrange to denote various confrontational configurations. Evans moves the cast around the open setting to denote the power struggles between the conflicting factions. The running time is a little over an hour, but the play feels like a week’s worth of revelations, recriminations and revolving narratives.

Josh Hamilton and Elizabeth Marvel in
The Ford/Hill Project.
Credit: Rebecca Smeyne

All four players are adept at conveying their characters’ inner and outer battles. Beans ably presents Hill’s calm, measured demeanor as she delivers her explosive account of Thomas’ alleged crude behavior. Yet you can also see her fighting to repress her repulsion and outrage, keeping a lid on her roiling emotions. Marvel is particularly marvelous in her chameleon-like changes from Ford’s shattering recounting of a sexual assault to Senator Lindsay Graham’s righteously impassioned defense of Kavanaugh. Bougere and Hamilton also display versatility and depth in dual renditions of the blustering defensive postures of the nominees and the measured testimony of Ford and Hill.

By only employing real testimony and not offering commentary, Marvel and Evans let the viewers decide the legitimacy of Ford and Hill’s claims and the truth of Thomas and Kavanaugh’s protestations of innocence. In a final searing image, both men don Supreme Court robes while the women stare at the audience as if defying them not to believe.

The design elements are basic, allowing the blazing testimony to speak for itself. Regardless of your political leanings, this Project will knock you and give you lots to think about once you recover.

Sept. 8—20. Waterwell at BAM Fisher (Fishman Space), 321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn, NY. Running time: 65 minutes with no intermission. bam.org.