The Ford / Hill Project ★★★★★

The Ford/Hill Project had a handful of performances at The Public in 2024 and just wrapped another too-short run at La MaMa as part of the Under the Radar Festival. What this riveting show by Waterwell now needs and deserves is a longer run.

Created by actor Elizabeth Marvel and director Lee Sunday Evans, the production blends and overlaps verbatim quotes from the contentious Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh in 1991 and 2018, respectively. It’s fitting that these two crucial events have now been combined and turned into a play, because both men gave over-the-top defenses when they were taken to task for sexual misconduct by strong, credible women — Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford — who had nothing to gain by testifying but telling their respective truths.

The outcomes are known from the start, but to see this amazing quartet of actors — Josh Hamilton, Jon Michael Hill, Amber Iman, and Marvel, all equipped with hearing devices to get as performatively close to the original testimony as possible — reenact this political theatre is both fascinating and dispiriting, especially considering how little progress was made in the nearly three decades between the two women’s damning attestations.

The show never flags. Each of the performers plays multiple roles and genders — Iman’s Southern male accent is delicious and accurate — and all the infamous lines and references — Long Dong Silver, pubic hair on a Coke can, “I like beer” — get aired yet again. The staging is minimal but effective, as Evans is able, using only a semi-circle of chairs, to re-create the feel of the original hearings and ensure that clarity about who is speaking is never in question.

The depicted people from the two hearings don’t actually overlap until the show’s end, when the two robed justices take their place on the court and the two women look at each other knowingly and sadly. Their convincing stories were heard but not sufficiently believed, resulting in a devastating conclusion for them, and a morally compromised one for the country.