The Tamesis
We all remember where we are, even though it’s a cliché. I was on the floor of the airport waiting for my early morning flight back to Madrid. The sound coming from my laptop speakers was weak and shaky, but we didn’t care. We gathered around the screen, this small group of college women studying abroad, trying to get the gist of what was happening back home, across the ocean. What did Kavanaugh say? “I like beer”?
We also like beer. It was 2018 and we were returning home from Oktoberfest, where we drank beer after beer. So maybe it was the hangover, maybe it was the lack of sleep, but when we closed the laptop I had to wipe my cheek with my sweater sleeve. it’s not even worth looking atwe complained. Just a silly reminder of what a sham it all is.
“I was in high school,” Elizabeth Marvel told me. “No, maybe I was at Juilliard. But I was fascinated by it. I watched the whole show on C-SPAN. It really inspired me to act as a feminist. In theory, I’ve always believed I was a feminist, but this was the first time it inspired me to act.”
She was referring to testimony from Anita Hill during the 1991 Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, when Hill accused Thomas of sexual harassment. Luckily, Marvel remembers it well: This January, she’ll be performing Hill and Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony live at La MaMa’s Under the Radar festival, along with Amber Iman. Ford/Hill Project Weaving together direct transcripts of the hearings of Judge Thomas and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, placing them in the context of dramatic conversations.
Marvel said that when you hear two women’s accounts and questions at the same time, they give you different impressions. “If you look at them, you can see how many of the same participants were present in both hearings,” she observed. “There were a lot of people in attendance, the Lindsey Graham family, the Joe Biden family. And then you realize a lot of them were saying the same thing.”
The famed stage and TV actor has had political undercurrents in much of Marvel’s work, but the pandemic inspired a moment of clarity mid-career. She started asking herself what legacy she wanted to leave behind. “I was in what the French call the 1950s, my later youth,” she said. “I’ve been creating for a long time, so I do have a little luxury of being able to consciously think about what I want to do next. So I started taking long walks and thinking: What does it mean to be an American? “
