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 in New York. 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?”
Hill’s testimony—and the way it captured Marvel’s attention as a young person—kept popping back into her head. She began to think of Hill’s and Ford’s stories as twin pillars framing her political consciousness. “If you dig further—if you look at the timeline,” Marvel notes, “you realize that the same summer [of 1982] that Anita Hill is being sexually harassed in the workplace, a teenage Christine Blasey Ford is in Bethesda, Maryland, like 20 miles away, being sexually assaulted at a party. As they say, history doesn’t repeat; it rhymes.”
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As she began to imagine coupling both women’s stories, she enlisted the help of her friend Lee Sunday Evans, the artistic director of Waterwell, to help her stage them. Evans was uniquely prepared for the task, having directed the 2022 film The Courtroom, a dramatic reenactment of a single, real-life deportation proceeding.
“I had this new practice of looking at transcripts and sort of remaking them into a theatrical event,” Evans says. “So a lot of my time sitting with the transcripts from both hearings was spent looking for the places where I could feel the text really jump off the page.”
Of course, the concept was rife with landmines. Over the years, Hill’s and Ford’s words and faces have been refrigerator magneted into oblivion, the women transformed into icons of liberal resistance. It’s also hard to create suspense in a piece that everyone knows the ending to—and with one false step, the project would fall into the trap of the “trauma plot,” a category of contemporary art critiqued for making trauma its only dramatic engine.
As Marvel and Evans point out, though, there is something timeless about a woman standing before a panel of skeptics and trying, against all odds, to state her case. “These hearings are almost Greek,” Marvel says. “You have this line of people sitting before them, and most of them are men, and they stand—and it’s like Antigone, telling her truth.”
“Both women felt to me like Antigone figures,” Evans echoes. “And that was a big revelation. They were regular citizens who became public figures because they had to stand in front of this body of power and talk about their own bodies and how power is manifested on bodies. And Antigone is doing the same thing.”
Each member of the four-person cast—which also includes Jon Michael Hill and Josh Hamilton—performs with an earpiece running their part of the transcript in real time. The challenge is to say their lines in unison with the original speaker, voicing them with no dramatization or embellishment. “It’s a little bit meta,” Evans says. “But it’s not meant to be an intellectual exercise. It’s meant to disrupt the idea of performance being overly polished—trying to do a little bit of justice to the impossible position of being under that much public scrutiny.”
“The closest thing I can tell people who want to understand what the experience is like is this: pick a podcast that you’ve never heard before,” says Amber Iman, a Tony-nominated Broadway mainstay. “Turn it on and try to speak with one of the hosts. Say what they’re saying exactly when they say it. If they cough, you have to cough. If they breathe, if they use the wrong word, you have to do it just like that. For an actor, it’s an opportunity to truly be a vessel, because all you can do is listen and trust.”
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With only their own part playing in their ear, each actor must rely on their castmates to fill in the gaps, and stay present enough to listen both to their feed and to each other. “You can’t learn it. You can’t prep for it,” Marvel tells me. “It’s like a speeding train coming at you, and if you don’t stay on it, it goes and you lose it. Amber and I were saying it’s like you’re channeling this voice through you.”
It’s “bone-chilling,” Iman says, to hear Hill in her ear and recast her emotions in real time. It’s allowed her to connect to the human being behind the headlines, to access the story of Hill’s sexual harassment in an entirely different way. “Something that struck me, especially as a Black woman and understanding Black families and how we communicate, is in the beginning of her testimony, when she calls out everyone who has shown up to support her. You realize that a busload of Black people—her parents, her siblings—have come to hear her testify about a man causing her harm. I can’t imagine speaking those words aloud, not only in front of the Supreme Court but also in front of my family. That’s what sticks with me.”
The whole team calls on such moments of personal connection to bring new resonance to these well-known stories. Additionally, each performance is capped by a public talk-back with activists in the reproductive rights and restorative justice movements, pointing the audience from contemplation to action at a time when sexual assault accusers are still regarded with skepticism.
“To tell the Ford–Hill story in the midst of the Diddy trials…” Iman muses. “I was out at a restaurant recently, and there was a Diddy video playing, and then an R. Kelly video playing, and nobody batted an eye. My friends and I realized: they’re just going to keep playing it. They’re going to keep playing the songs, they’re going to keep watching the videos. Nothing is going to change until men realize that they are the problem. That’s honestly so sobering. It’s humiliating.”
And so the cast of The Ford/Hill Project seeks to change its audience minute by minute, sounding and sustaining the call for accountability, no matter how it’s been evaded in the past. “We have so many people telling us that things are decided for us and that we have no voice in the matter,” Marvel tells me. “And I would like people to realize that we do.”
The Ford/ Hill Project will run from January 7 - 11, 2026 at the Club @ La MaMa as part of the Under the Radar Festival.