Unquestioned Integrity:
By Carol Burbank
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The testimony is verbatim but Hunt has carefully edited it to show the conflicts and alliances enacted during the hearings: this carefully staged dose of reality creates a tension that fiction rarely achieves. Placing Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Senate committee (represented by one actor) onstage forces us to reenact our own voyeurism from the peanut galleries of our living rooms in 1991. But in the theater we can’t turn off the TV or take a snack break when we get disgusted. This condensed reenactment, which gives equal time to Hill and Thomas, forces us to confront our recent past. We become a de facto jury but are tainted by our own previous judgments, jokes, and inattention during the actual hearings.
When Hill (Celeste Williams) watches from the background as Thomas cries out, “This is a circus…a high-tech lynching,” she’s both sympathetic and angry in her stillness, embodying black women’s struggle to support their race while confronting sexual discrimination. Sullen and trapped, David Barr’s Clarence Thomas has a desperate and calculated dignity. He moves painfully sometimes, as if he were held together only by the will to remain still. At other moments it seems as if his controlled self-righteousness were a form of violence, focused in a stare or a seemingly casual gesture, a hand resting on the back of a chair. All three performers copy their originals precisely, creating imitations so uncanny they made me forget they were actors. They enable the transcripts to stand on their own, with no asides, interior monologues, or exposition.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Joann Carney.
