Review: Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford testify again in 'The Ford/Hill Project'

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Set us as preferred The staging is simple.A circle of nine stately wood chairs on a bare stage.

Four actors, affixed with in-ear monitors, occupy different seats as testimony is elicited, provided and undermined.The Senate Judiciary Committee is back in session in “The Ford/Hill Project,” now at REDCAT through Saturday.What follows is some of the most riveting and distressing testimony ever delivered in such a setting.Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford are called back to testify under oath about the Supreme Court nominations of Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, respectively.

This documentary drama, created by Elizabeth Marvel and director Lee Sunday Evans, is composed from the verbatim transcripts of these painful proceedings.In 1991, Hill testified that Thomas had repeatedly sexually harassed her when he was her supervisor at the U.S.Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Department of Education.

In 2018, Ford testified that she had been sexually assaulted in 1982 by a 17-year-old Kavanaugh when she was 15.Marvel and Evans create a double helix from excerpts of these two hearings, which are separated by nearly 30 years yet reveal highly entrenched patriarchal patterns.Two women, summoning the courage to tell what they know about two men who are about to be entrusted with the most consequential governmental power, are put through the wringer as the political machine shifts into gear.Marvel, one of the treasures of New York theater, took on the role of Ford at the Brooklyn Academy of Music earlier this month.

(The piece premiered at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in 2024.) At REDCAT, the superb Rosemarie DeWitt assumes Marvel’s place, standing in for Ford but never attempting anything as crass as an impersonation.The production, under Evans’ precise direction, manages to find a tone that might be pa...