At BAM Fisher, nine chairs form a faint semicircle. Four actors in business casual put in earbud headphones, and for sixty-five minutes Lee Sunday Evans and Elizabeth Marvel’s “The Ford/Hill Project” plays the Senate back at us: the 1991 Clarence Thomas hearings and the 2018 Brett Kavanaugh hearings spliced into a single verbatim re-enactment.

Doreen St. Félix’s Critic’s Notebook is less review than argument about what the staging exposes:

  • Marvel plays Christine Blasey Ford, Gabby Beans plays Anita Hill, Josh Hamilton plays Kavanaugh, Teagle F. Bougere plays Thomas — and all four toggle into senator roles, circling one another in what she calls “a gravitational choreography.”
  • The testimony arrives through the earpieces, “including the stammers, the halts, the trip-ups that even the official transcript does not record.”
  • Stripped of the bureaucratic veneer of the system, the state reads as “an invisible force, everywhere and nowhere.”
  • One senator’s voice recurs across both hearings twenty-seven years apart (she thinks it was Patrick Leahy’s), turning government into “a frieze of unchanging agents, power entrenched.”
  • Both men finish by putting on court robes and taking their seats while Hill and Ford look on, back to “their work of undoing.”
  • The play is framed by Tiresias’ warning to Creon in Antigone: “All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride.”

The years 1991 and 2018 are made to rhyme, and the argument runs against “certain soothing myths about the inevitability of progress.” Procedure is played as fatuous — senators calling dibs on introductions, bickering over seat placements — while the two women who testified are reduced to evidence. St. Félix notes that the play is a product of the present as much as a capture of the past: “activist theatre presented in a moment when the idea of civic urgency is losing purchase,” with an air of mechanization that mirrors the numbness of being governed by a cabal.

She also names what the script leaves downstairs — the racial expectations stored around these two women. Orrin Hatch calling Ford “attractive,” a “pleasing” witness in 2018; Hatch holding up a copy of The Exorcist in 1991 to accuse Hill of lifting the pubic-hair detail from the novel. From Toni Morrison’s 1992 anthology Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power she draws Nell Irvin Painter’s point that Hill, unable to slot into the visible roles of mammy or jezebel, “seemed to disappear” — and Morrison’s and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s account of her being “de-raced” in the American imagination.

Her sharpest line is about memory: she was not yet born in 1991, yet insists she was there. The flagellation of Anita Hill is a collective memory that “transcends anything as inconvenient as birth” — which is roughly the case for staging it again now.