The Ford/Hill Project

Tweet

Actress Elizabeth Marvel and director Lee Sunday Evans’ The Ford/Hill Project, a docudrama first seen in New York in 2024 which uses the verbatim text of the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas Senate confirmation hearings in 1991 and the Christine Blasey Ford/Brett Kavanagh Senate hearings in 2018, has made a return visit to New York, this time to BAM Fisher’s Fishman Space and the results are riveting.

Whether you recall seeing the hearings on television or are witnessing this testimony for the first time, it strikes you that these two cases are among the worse miscarriages of justice in American jurisprudence. The current four-character cast includes Marvel as Doctor Ford, Gabby Beans as Professor Hill, Teagle F. Bougere as Judge Thomas and Josh Hamilton as Judge Kavanaugh. (Marvel and Hamilton have appeared in the play before.) All of the lines that became famous during the hearing are here.

For those who do not remember their history or are too young to have heard it before, during the Judge Thomas and Judge Kavanaugh hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, these two women came forward to give their testimony as to the character of these two nominees that they had encountered earlier in their lives, Hill having worked for Thomas in Washington, D.C., and Ford at age 15 having been part of a group at the Columbia County Club in Chevy Chase, Maryland, that socialized with Kavanaugh then aged 17. Hill testified that she had been sexually harassed during most of her time working in Thomas’ department at two different jobs and locations, and Ford claimed to have been sexually assaulted by Kavanaugh at a gathering one night at a home after the country club.

While Hill’s testimony was an example of “she said/he said,” other witnesses came forward, both men and women, claiming that Kavanaugh had assaulted other women and that he had had blackouts at college after nights of binge drinking. However, none of these witnesses were called by the Senate committee. In 1991, the members of the Senate committee were all male, while in 2018 four of the 21 members were women. (Ironically, some of the same senators appeared in both hearings.) You may recall, the women were not believed and both men were overwhelmingly elected to their seats on the Supreme Court where they still are today.

The question remains were the women telling the truth and why had they waited so long to come forward? One has to remember one’s history. When Hill worked for Thomas in 1981-1983, sexual harassment had only become a legal crime but few had the courage to come forward with that accusation. (One in four American women claim that they have been sexually harassed both on the job and elsewhere.) In Hill’s case, Thomas was her boss so that he not only made the assignments but could have affected her work record. She testified that she chose to ignore it and hoped it would go away which it didn’t until she left his employ.

In the case of Ford, at 15 she didn’t want to tell her parents she had been to an unchaperoned party with drunk boys. She also chose to remain silent and just avoid such gatherings in the future. Crying rape in those days would have most likely sullied her reputation and not have gotten her any justice. Even today many rape cases end in dismissal as they are very difficult to prove without witnesses. Were the women lying? Considering they had nothing to gain and a great deal to lose by coming forward (reputation, scandal, and opprobrium from some quarters), it is unlikely that they had any other reason than wanting to air the truth. Also if they had been lying, they certainly would have made up better stories than the ones they told.

The recreation begins with Marvel as Dr. Ford and Beans as Prof. Hill with the male actors as the judge nominees and senator questioners. The testimonies of Hill and Ford alternate, so that it times sounds like parallel statements made 27 year apart which is rather eerie. In the course of the play, the men and women swap roles, and then the women take on the roles of the senators, with Hamilton testifying as Kavanaugh and Bougere as Thomas. This breaks the play up into sections although at times it becomes a little confusing. According to the printed text of the play, the actors wear in-ear monitors that feed them edited clips from the real audio of the hearings. The play begins with real-life audio of the hearing and then the audio drops out and the actors take over repeating what they are hearing in their headphones. While this sounds complicated and convoluted, it works to the extent that the audience forgets that this is what is happening though at times there seems to be a delay in what we are hearing.

The women are cool and unemotional with Marvel’s Ford seeming the best prepared though Beans’ Hill becomes stronger and more confident as the hearing goes on. Ironically, it is the men, Hamilton as Kavanaugh and Bougere as Thomas who lose their temper and their demeanor although to be truthful, they had the most to lose, reputation, job and appointment to the Supreme Court. The staging becomes more and more engrossing as we hear the tenor of the questions and realize that the women are fighting a losing battle.

Using the edited text created by Marvel and Sunday, Sunday’s direction and staging is polished and assured. The stage is set up with nine chairs (the number of justices on the Supreme Court) and two are moved forward for the testimony. Different parts of the Fishman stage are used at different times. At the end, the chairs are all put back in one line, the two men put on their judicial robes and take their seats, a reminder that after all we have heard the Senate confirmed these men anyway.

The Ford/Hill Project is important theater lest we forget and it happens next time. Women still have to fight to be believed in a world still dominated by men. The lines that became famous during the hearing will be seared into your consciousness like Hill repeating that Thomas said to her in a meeting in his office, “Who has put public hair on my coke?” Thomas saying this was a “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks,” Ford saying she “thought that Brett was accidentally going to kill me” and  Kavanagh’s defense of his conduct, “Yes, we drank beer. I like beer. Still like beer. We drank beer.” Lest we forget.

The Ford/Hill Project (September 8 – 20, 2026)

Waterwell

Fishman Space at BAM Fisher, 321 Ashland Place, in Brooklyn

For tickets, visit http://www.BAM.org

Running time: 70 minutes without an intermission