The Theatermakers Turning the Testamonies of Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford Into Dialogue

We all remember where we were, trite as it is to say. I was on the floor of an airport, waiting for an early-morning flight back to Madrid. The sound from my laptop speakers was tinny and warbled, but we didn’t care. We gathered around the screen, this small group of college-aged women studying abroad, trying to get the gist of what was happening at home, an ocean away. What was it Kavanaugh said? “I liked beer”?

We liked beer, too. It was 2018 and we were heading home from Oktoberfest, where we’d sloshed stein after stein. So maybe it was the hangover, maybe the lack of sleep, but by the time we closed the laptop, I had to wipe my cheeks with a sweater sleeve. It wasn’t even worth watching, we grumbled. Just a stupid reminder of what a sham it all was.

“I was in high school,” Elizabeth Marvel tells me. “No—maybe I was at Juilliard then. But I was glued to it. I watched the entirety of it on C-SPAN. It really spurred my feminism into action. Theoretically, I had always believed myself to be a feminist, but it was the first time that it motivated action on my part.”

She’s referring to Anita Hill’s testimony during the Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in 1991, when Hill accused Thomas of sexual harassment. It’s a good thing Marvel remembers it well: This January, she will star alongside Amber Iman in a live performance of Hill and Christine Blasey Ford’s testimonies at La MaMa’s Under the Radar Festival. The Ford/Hill Project weaves together direct transcripts from both Justice Thomas’s and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s hearings, placing them in dramatic dialogue.

When you hear both women’s accounts and questionings side by side, Marvel says, they strike you differently. “If you look at them, you see how many of the same players are in both hearings,” she observes. “You have the Lindsey Grahams, the Joe Bidens—so many people present in both. And then you realize so many of them are saying exactly the same thing.”

There’s a political undercurrent to much of Marvel’s work as a celebrated stage and television actor, but the pandemic inspired a mid-career moment of clarity. She started asking herself what she wanted her legacy to be. “I’m in, as the French call the 50s, the youth of my old age,” she says. “I’ve been making work for a long time, so I do have a little bit of a luxury to be intentional about what I want to make next. And so I started taking these long walks and thinking: What does it mean to be an American?”