THEATER REVIEW : ‘Integrity’ a Glance Back at Troubled Political Waters

Remember when what had us riveted in front of our TV sets was the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings? The national obsession with those dramatic charges and countercharges was only in part a desire to determine guilt or innocence. It also pointed to our collective confusion about racial fury, sexual harassment and the privileges of the rich and famous.

Mame Hunt, playwright of “Unquestioned Integrity” at the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre Company’s Hahn Cosmopolitan Theatre, probes these larger questions in her 1993 docudrama about the 1991 hearings.

Without changing a word from the transcripts, she fingers the most nefarious villains of the battle: the Senate committee, played by one actor (Jack Banning), as all the powerful white male senators.

In 72 intermissionless minutes, as Banning’s senators alternately badger and butter up Hill (Robin Wilkinson) and Thomas (Carl Gilliard), it becomes clear that the goal of the hearings is not to determine the veracity of Hill’s charges of sexual harassment and Thomas’ fitness for the Supreme Court, but to score political points with as much mudslinging, posturing and pomposity as possible.

The greatest accomplishment of Hunt’s play is that it puts the mud back where it belongs--on the senators. The problem is that the show is static and director Adleane Hunter does not find a way to compensate.

Jeff Hall’s set design sets up a long Senate hearing table with Banning in the middle of 13 identically dressed dummy senators. It’s an effective image that grows dull after the point is made. Wilkinson portrays Hill with great dignity and intelligence but without modulation from beginning to end. Gilliard’s wildly erupting anger needs to be directed even more powerfully against the senators.

And Banning, who captures the Southern good-old-boy senatorial type particularly well, would do better to convey a variety of inflections in portraying the two-faced public servants.

Still, despite its flaws, “Unquestioned Integrity” provides an insightful and sad look at the lack of integrity in our government at work.

* “Unquestioned Integrity,” Gaslamp Quarter Theatre Company’s Hahn Cosmopolitan Theatre, 444 Fourth Ave., San Diego. Wednesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Ends April 2. $19.50-$25. (619) 234-9583. Running time: 1 hour, 12 minutes.