Someone Else Committed Their Crimes

One of them says that as soon as he returns home, his instinct is to lock his door because it has become natural for him to feel locked up. Another describes the daily ordeal of taking a shower and seeing his scars, including the obscene words that were carved into his buttocks by fellow prisoners. "The State of Texas executed me over a thousand times, man," he says, "and it just keeps doin' it."

These last words, from an intense and deeply affecting new documentary play called "The Exonerated," are uttered in a quiet voice that mixes resignation with enduring astonishment. The speaker is Richard Dreyfuss, and he is reading an account by Kerry Max Cook, who spent 22 years on death row for a murder he did not commit.

Though Mr. Dreyfuss is a famously flashy performer, he delivers Mr. Cook's observations without dramatic flourishes. The actor, for the moment, has vanished. And the words, and the hurt behind them, do seem to slip directly under your skin, testaments to the idea that some scars never disappear.

Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen's "Exonerated," which opened last night at 45 Bleecker Theater, is an artfully edited anthology of interviews with six former death row prisoners who were all discovered to be innocent of the crimes for which they were incarcerated.

The mission of this work, clearly, is to edify, to shake the complacency of Americans who feel that unjust imprisonment is found only under totalitarian governments in foreign lands. "The Exonerated" is, in other words, a worthy enterprise, for which a fashionable cluster of right-minded stars, including Jill Clayburgh and Sara Gilbert, have been enlisted. (Other celebrity performers are to replace them later.)

Yet theatergoers for whom the adjective worthy is a signal to buy another round of tickets to "Mamma Mia!" should reconsider. There is no reek of piety or creak of didacticism about "The Exonerated," which has been directed with elegant spareness by Bob Balaban. It is, on its own terms, thoroughly involving theater, while reminding you that real life has a way of coming up with resonant metaphors, grotesque ironies and cruel coincidences that no dramatist would dare invent.

"The Exonerated" has been staged as a concert reading, with 10 performers seated behind music stands bearing their scripts. Many of the readers have obviously memorized their roles, to which they bring a hypnotic and seemingly ego-free focus. There are no isolated moments that scream "watch me," no fancy tics and quavers to pump up the emotional volume.

Such modesty suits "The Exonerated," which tells stories that require no artificial heightening. The first part of the evening is principally devoted to jaw-dropping accounts, delivered with matter-of-factness, of interrogations, arrests and trials. Steeped in retrospective disbelief and disorientation, these stories inevitably evoke the harrowing opening chapters of "The Trial."

Three of the convicted men are black, and for them in particular, the world might have been created by Franz Kafka. As Delbert Tibbs (Charles Brown), a former seminary student convicted of a rape and murder in Florida, says, "As I sometimes tell people, if you're accused of a sex crime in the South and you're black, you probably shoulda done it, you know."

Embodied with wry gravitas by Mr. Brown, Mr. Tibbs is the play's philosopher in residence, whose poetic ruminations frame the accounts of the other speakers. Yet all of the title characters of "The Exonerated" have become philosophers by necessity, trying to find logic and design in what has happened to them.

Gary Gauger (Jay O. Sanders), an organic farmer convicted of murdering his parents, is led to ponder the blurred lines between reality and perception. Other responses run from a shriveling of religious faith to an odds-defying affirmation of it. These two poles are embodied persuasively by Curtis McClarin as David Keaton, who loses his cherished religion on death row, and by Ms. Clayburgh as Sunny Jacobs.

Ms. Jacobs's companion, Jesse Tafero, was electrocuted for the crime of which both were accused, the shooting of two law officers. Yet as Ms. Jacobs speaks of her wish to be "a living memorial," Ms. Clayburgh radiates a self-surprising and sincere joy.

To lend dramatic variety, outside voices are occasionally introduced, from those of interrogating police officers (Bruce Kronenberg and Philip Levy) to family members and lawyers. In some cases, this parceling out of roles leads to confusion and can distract from dramatic flow.

But there is welcome, tension-releasing interplay between Robert Earl Hayes (David Brown Jr.) and his wife, Georgia (April Yvette Thompson), as they describe the jumpy rhythms of Mr. Hayes's return to civilian life. And the mostly underused Ms. Gilbert, as the woman who marries Mr. Cook after his release from prison, has a heartbreaking moment in which she describes her first impressions of a man frozen in the styles of 22 years earlier.

Films and television movies inspired by similar subjects usually focus on the legal and detective work that frees the prisoner, building to a climax of deliverance. This is not what "The Exonerated" is about, and it spends far more time on lives that exist in the extended shadows of death sentences, even after prison.

Ms. Clayburgh, as Ms. Jacobs, asks the audience to perform a sobering exercise. "I'll give you a moment just to reflect," she says of her years of incarceration. "From 1976 to 1992, just remove that entire chunk from your life." In asking you to stare into that abyss, and to sense even slightly its gravitational pull, "The Exonerated" reminds you that some American nightmares are never over.

WBAI (95.5/NYC) by David Rothenburg

When the theatre soars, it can be like a citadel. The Exonerated, a new play by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen is an exhilarating, illuminating, and mesmerizing experience. This remarkable work at 45 Bleecker Theater is an experience that transcends the traditional proscenium arch. Like its ancestor, The Living Newspaper, The Exonerated mirrors a segment of Americana and demands that attention be paid.

The playwrights interviewed 40 death row inmates and selected five men and one woman, whose collective stories are devastating. All were eventually released, some serving as long as 22 years, yards away from the electric chair. All has been determined as innocent, mostly when hidden evidence emerged before the state could execute them. They were entombed innocent persons all because the woman holding the scales of justice outside of most American courtrooms remains blindfolded.

Director Bob Balaban has staged The Exonerated as a dramatic reading, not unlike what we have seen with "The Don Juan in Hell", or more recently "The Vagina Monologues". It is to the credit of the director and the extraordinary cast that the images created are so vivid that sets and costumes might well have been an incursion. Anyone who grew up with radio knows that the mind can be a creative designer.

The actors and the people they play are Charles Brown (Delbert Tibbs) David Brown Jr. (Robert Earl/Hayes), Jill Clayburgh (Sunny Jacobs), Richard Dryfuss (Kerry Max Cook), Curtis McClarin (David Keaton) and Jay O Sanders (Gary Gauger). Sara Gilbert, Bruce Kronenburg, Philip Levy, and April Yvette Thompson, serving as a modified Greek chorus, assume a multitude of roles that were imposed on the convicted, as judges, prosecutors, police and prison officers, and at times, significant others.

I wouldn't even begin to single out any one of the cast for all have embraces their characters with a humanity and ferocity that ignites the theatre.

Near the end of the play, Delbert Tibbs (played by Mr. Brown), alerts us that some might ask you to tell them what is right with America, a country that he admits he loves. But he challenges the audience, "Do you ever ask what is right with your car? But you do want to know when something goes wrong?".

The revelation of a political expediency and criminal injustice is not a fresh report, nor is it restricted to Texas or Florida, two states that dominance that evening. A close examination of the young men convicted in the Central Park jogger case, or memories of George Whitmore flirting with Death Row, brings this play to our doorsteps.

At the performance I attended, four of the men whose lives were depicted on stage, were introduced at the play's conclusion. Audience members mingles with the actors and their real life counterparts giving the evening a dramatic urgency that is nearly unimaginable. Hugs and tears were exchanged and the drama invaded our pores.

For of the pain imposed on these remarkable and abused individuals, The Exonerated, ultimately and curiously, is an affirmation. The hopeful words of Sunny Jacobs (Jill Clayburgh) resonance long after you depart from 45 Bleecker. To have your mind and senses touched so deeply by a work of art can only enrich the participant and that, in itself, is an affirmation.

New York Magazine by John Simon

Docudramas can take liberties with the truth in subtle, sometimes unintentional ways. But I have no reason to disbelieve Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen that the vast majority of The Exonerated is "as it was said two, five, ten, and twenty years ago by the actual participants." These are six people who spent from 2 to 22 years on death row, were then found innocent, and eventually were set free. Besides interviewing them, Blank and Jensen "spent countless hours in dusty courthouse record rooms" unearthing how these things came to pass. Mistaken for law students, the pair were allowed to proceed. "With a few exceptions, each word spoken comes from the public record."

The ten seated actors, with scripts which, however, they barely use, enact the six victims as well as various family members and officials. What they say is moving not only because it is horrible and true but also because of how simply yet powerfully it is expressed. Six decent but not initially extraordinary persons are transmuted by injustice, suffering, and endurance into speakers of something very close to poetry. We shudder to think how much of their lives was wrongfully annihilated by the state, with frequently delayed releases even after innocence was established, and not a penny in compensation. The equally guiltless husband of one woman was executed; she vows to be his living memorial. Whatever you may think of the death penalty, or of our system of justice, the play should make you think, and feel, some more.

Under Bob Balaban's direction, the ten actors are unerring. They are Charles Brown, David Brown Jr., Jill Clayburgh, Richard Dreyfuss, Sara Gilbert, Bruce Kronenberg, Phillip Levy, Curtis McClairin, Jay O. Sanders, and April Yvette Thompson. Honor to them all.

New Yorker by John Lahr

...By contrast, "The Exonerated," well written by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen and directed by Bob Balaban (at the 45 Bleecker Theatre), is the most basic kind of theatre: no sets, no costumes, no songs, no spectacle. What it does have to offer is extraordinary news: the harrowing stories of a handful of the more than a hundred souls who have spent up to twenty-two years on death row before walking free. Put together from interviews and from the public record, the play is performed by ten actors whose lines bear witness both to the ineptness of the American judicial system and to the poetry of ordinary citizens. "It is dangerous to dwell too much on things," says the African-American Delbert, who was wrongly charged with murder by the Florida police. "To wonder who or why or when, to wonder how, is dangerous." But this is precisely what the play dares to do; its stories are stark and riveting and cunningly orchestrated. Still, arguing Off Broadway against the death penalty is like pushing at an open door. "The Exonerated" belongs in the hinterland, where its rigor could face down the forces of righteousness.

Broadway.com by Adam Feldman

In the United States, the only Western democracy that permits capital punishment, opponents of the death penalty fall into two general camps, with considerable overlap. Some groups, like Amnesty International, reject capital punishment on principal, as a form of punishment that is inherently cruel. Others, like the Innocence Project, work to correct mistakes within the system, and to ensure that innocent people are not put to death for crimes they did not commit. The Exonerated, a powerful and understatedly polemical theater piece by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, officially focuses on the latter concern. Painstakingly assembled from interviews and court documents, the play presents the stories of six men and women who were falsely convicted on capital crimes, then eventually released with the help of new evidence and DNA analysis. Their cases are less rare than one might imagine.

"At the time we conducted these interviews, there were 89 people who had been exonerated from death row," Blank and Jensen observe in the program, "As of this writing there are now 102." Thanks to pro bono crusaders like Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, the list grows every day; as of October 10, it had swelled to 114. The Exonerated simply and eloquently exposes the myriad clogs that can twist the gears of the criminal justice system: coerced confessions, unqualified public defenders, sheriffs running for reelection, small towns in panic. Plain bigotry is a major factor in many of the cases presented on stage; three of the six defendants are black men, and a fourth worked in a gay bar at the time of his arrest. (The prosecutor at his trial is shown exhorting the jury to convict: "Let's let all the freaks and perverts and murderous homosexuals of the world know what we do to them in the court of law--that we take their lives.")

The style of The Exonerated is documentary and unfussy. The 10 members of the cast, led by Richard Dreyfuss and Jill Clayburgh, sit in a straight row on a blank stage, spotlighted in turns as they read from the scripts on music stands. Their stories unfold and melt into one another. Kerry Max Cook (Dreyfuss), convicted of murder in Texas at the age of 19, spent the next 22 years in prison, where he was brutally raped and beaten. Sunny Jacobs (Clayburgh), a self-described hippie, was at the scene of the crime when two police officers were killed; she spent 15 years in jail, many of them in virtual solitary confinement. Delbert Tibbs (the grave, glorious-voiced Charles Brown), a highly articulate poet, was essentially convicted of being black in northern Florida; David Keaton (Curtis McClarin) and Robert Earl Hayes (David Brown, Jr.) were similarly railroaded. Gary Gauger (Jay O. Sanders), an organic farmer, was sent to death row for killing his parents, a crime to which members of a biker gang later confessed. Bruce Kronenberg and Philip Levy play a variety of judges, lawyers, and witnesses; Sara Gilbert and April Yvette Thompson handle the smaller female roles, with Thompson bringing a welcome comic lift to her scenes. Under Bob Balaban's sensitive direction, the ensemble performs with dignified directness.

Although it tells its stories with great tact, The Exonerated is unhesitant about its intentions. Those who already oppose capital punishment will surely be moved by the outrageous truths depicted here, and even the death penalty's most ardent defenders are likely to emerge shaken. The play is quietly confrontational, and some of its best effects are achieved in silence. When Clayburgh's Jacobs puts the time stolen from her in context--"from 1976 to 1992, just remove that entire chunk of your life, and that's what happened"--she pauses for a moment, and you can feel the audience bristle with the pain of that imagined subtraction. The Exonerated is unavoidably political, but Blank and Jensen skirt the lures of propaganda by focusing on the human dimension of their subjects' ordeals, and on the faith and hard work that rescued them from despair. Like Jacobs, the play is determined "not to believe in hopelessness." Out of six ruined lives, Blank and Jensen have helped build a platform from which a kinder future can be spied.

The Associated Press by Mark Evans

 A New Play Details the Lives of six wrongly sent to Death Row

It's not until very late in "The Exonerated" that the audience is asked to pause for several seconds and imagine a chilling hypothetical: Someone is murdered. You're innocent but you're convicted of a crime a sentences to live out your days on death row.

How would it feel to have everything, including your freedom, wrongly taken from you? How would you handle it?

"From 1976 to 1992, just remove that entire chunk from your life," says Sonia "Sunny" Jacobs, played by actress Jill Clayburgh in the documentary theater piece that opened Thursday at 45 Bleecker Theater.

Jacobs' true tale of wrongful conviction is one of six recounted in the interwoven monologues of "The Exonerated," which has drawn a first-rate cast that includes Clayburgh, Richard Dreyfuss, and Sara Gilbert.

The power of the 90-minute play is in its directness. The stage in the small theater is darkened and mostly barren. The actors remain seated, their faces illuminated for a minute or two at a time as the narratives unfold. Their solemn words are punctuated by sounds of gunshots or sirens or the pulsing static of an electric chair.

It is simple, honest storytelling that demands reflection by the audience. And it's made riveting- uncomfortably so, at times- by what's at stake: the lives of real people unfairly and tragically shaken to the core.

The project is the brainchild of two young writers- Erik Jensen and Jessica Blank- who spent three years traveling the United States and interviewing former death row inmates. The script is composed entirely of courts documents and snippets from interviews.

Among the most disturbing and compelling stories is that told by Dryfuss. He plays Kerry Max Cook, sentenced to die for the murder of a woman in his apartment complex in Texas. DNA evidence finally proves his innocence- after 22 years, during which he is brutalized in prison, his brother is killed and his family is left in emotional tatters.

"My mother would look me in the eye and tell me I'm responsible for my brother's murder that is it weren't for me going to death row, he'd still be here. She would tell me that," Dreyfuss intones, his voice trailing off.

Indeed, many of the saddest and most poignant of the play's moments deal with the peripheral effects of injustice. How are families and friends affected? How are spiritual beliefs testes, and how do they change? How does it feel to be finally free? The answers are ambiguous.

To his credit, director Bob Balaban manages to steer away from overt peachiness, allowing the details of these shattered lives to accumulate and slowly envelop the audience.

Still, there is a clear anti-death penalty message- but one that only emerges secondarily. These stories are powerful; would they have been less so had the wrongly accused merely been sentences to life in prison?

Skeptical audiences also may well question whether the stories are unfairly slanted. Law enforcement and the legal system are portrayed only in their worst light- and some of the actors tend to go over the top in depicting racist police officers, brutal prison guards, shady prosecutors, and lazy defense lawyers.

These are mostly minor points, however. The focus rightly should be on the men and woman who, through cruel twists, and their lives changed forever.

WPKN-FM: 89.5 On the Dial by Isa Goldberg

Reporting from Off- Broadway. This is Isa Goldberg.

Culled from 40 interviews and thousands of affidavits, depositions, police interrogations, and court transcripts. The Exonerated documents the lives of five men and one woman sentenced to death row and subsequently freed. The six individuals we meet here represent the 89 former death row prisoner's authors Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen studied during the year 2000.

Stages as dramatic reading with actors, Richard Dreyfuss, Jill Clayburgh, Sara Gilbert and others, the production by the Culture Project has the feel of political theatre, as it clearly identifies the need to reform the judicial system. Among the most plaintiff, Ms. Clayburgh's Sunny Jacobs was the only woman sentenced to death row in 1976. Her response was disbelief, "I'm a vegetarian, how could anyone possibly think I would kill someone?" As we experience the failure of those who could not take her seriously, especially her parents who refused to find a lawyer, because she had already been appointed one by the court. She remarks coolly, "They didn't know."

While racial prejudice lies behind many of the false judgments and wrongful sentences Blank and Jensen researches, the six victims portrayed here are from a wide range of ethnic, religious, and educational backgrounds. Mr. Dreyfuss' Kerry Max Cook, a 22 year old Texan, accused of murdering a young woman in his apartment building, reports, "I was not trash. If it could happen to me, it could happen to anyone."

The most well known, an African American poet and political activist, Delbert Tibbs, was found guilty for raping a white teenager and murdering her boyfriend, even though there was no physical or circumstantial evidence linking him to the crime. The only circumstance was that he was black in the early 70's. As Charles Brown the actor who portrays him on stage testifies, "If you are accused of a sex crime in the South you probably should have done it, cause you will be found guilty."

As the drama The Exonerated is a gripping study of individuals who face the most unjust fate and learn to overcome it. It is riveting as well for demonstrating the deception that drives the judicial system, the lies that are perpetrated to defend false judgments, and the prosecutorial misconduct that prevails. For the prosecutor, it's "Burger King in the courtroom. You can have it your way," explained Kerry Cook who appeared in a Q & A with Delbert Tibbs and the director, Bob Balaban following the performance.

That's this week Off- Broadway. I'm Isa Goldberg.

Variety by Charles Isherwood

"The Exonerated" is about as plain-wrap as theater comes. Actors sit on stools arrayed at the lip of the stage, with scripts on music stands in front of them. There are no sets and costumes to speak of, and only lighting is used to punctuate the transitions between speakers. The evening's ultimate message is blunt, too: The death penalty, as it is administered by a flawed American justice system, is a moral monstrosity.

This will not be news to most Gotham theatergoers, a problem acknowledged by Richard Dreyfuss, one of the evening's high-profile stars, in a brief postshow address. He encouraged audience members to get the word out to "the unpersuaded," and the point is well taken. But that doesn't mean the evening holds no interest for the firmly persuaded.

It is by no means a dry jeremiad. Drawn from a series of interviews with men and women who spent time on death row before being cleared of the crimes for which they were sentenced, it is necessarily disturbing and even grueling. So why subject yourself to it, if you're already opposed to the death penalty? Well, why read novels about the Holocaust? Why watch movies wherein bad things happen to good people? Bearing witness to human suffering is one of art's imperatives, and "The Exonerated" is an artful and moving evening of documentary theater.

The play's authors, Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, assembled the text from interviews they conducted with some 40 men and women who had served as many as 22 years on death row. The experiences of six are represented here. The authors later researched law records to supplement the first-person narratives with actual testimony from court cases.

It's in these early segments detailing the arrests and convictions of the main "characters" that "The Exonerated" is weakest. With a pair of actors on either end of the stage exuberantly impersonating a variety of mendacious lawyers, benighted judges and corrupt police officers, the show tips inevitably into caricature, even if the appalling truth is that every word was actually uttered in a courtroom.

More moving is the plain-spoken reflections on their experience from the wrongfully imprisoned. They include Sunny Jacobs, played with clear-eyed dignity by Jill Clayburgh, a mother of two who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. She was convicted as a cop killer when the actual murderer made a plea bargain with prosecutors ("I don't think three life sentences is a bargain," she dryly notes). Dreyfuss offers a fine contribution as a man who was convicted of killing a young woman in Texas despite ample evidence pointing to another suspect; his quiet descriptions of harrowing experiences in jail are heartbreaking. Sara Gilbert, the third name presence in the cast (the celebrity lineup will change as the run continues), is underused but affecting in a couple of small roles.

Details of the coerced confessions, dubious evidence, implicit and explicit racism certainly set the pulse racing with anger, but the perseverance of the victims in the face of such treatment inspires respect and a kind of wonder. Small details illuminate the depth of these people's suffering. Charles Brown, of majestic voice and sly humor, plays Delbert Tibbs, who managed to retain his philosophical perspective and his affection for poetry despite being railroaded into jail. He describes the toughest challenge in returning to the world: "When you're in prison, you can't allow yourself to feel too much. So when you get out, you've gotta practice. I had to practice a bunch to be human again."

David Brown Jr. and Curtis McClarin give vivid, emotionally potent performances as separate victims of trials tainted by racism. For McClarin's David Keaton, the transition back into the world seemed never to have happened. "Maybe I'm still in there, in a way," he says. "Cause after I was out, I would go to work, I would come home, I would shut the door, and I would lock it. Just like in prison." Brown's Robert Earl Hayes had the help of his girlfriend Georgia (a winning April Yvette Thompson) after his release, but he still faced humiliations there. His dream of becoming a horse trainer ended when he was denied a license due to his conviction -- a conviction overturned by the Supreme Court. "I can legally get a gun, but I can't get a license to drive a horse," he notes with ripe irony.

As harrowing as such testimony can be, there is a surprising amount of humor, too, as when Sunny says in disbelief at the idea that she could have killed anyone, "But I'm a vegetarian."

Funny in a more macabre way is the story of Gary Gauger, played with soft-spoken skill by Jay O. Sanders. Gauger was convicted of killing his parents on the basis of a completely hypothetical description of the events -- squeezed out of him after hours of interrogation -- that bore no resemblance to the details of the crime.

"I want to be a living memorial," says Sunny in the play's final moments, after describing, in harrowing detail, the execution of her equally guiltless husband. The creators of "The Exonerated," led by director Bob Balaban, who oversees the production with unobtrusive skill, are seeing to it that she is. The play is on the one hand a devastating memorial to injustice, but it also pays handsome tribute to the resilience of human hearts and minds. Having endured misfortunes it might be more comfortable to try to forget, the men and women depicted here chose to tell their stories, in the hope that one day there will be no more such stories to tell. The least we can do is listen.

The Hollywood Reporter by Frank Scheck

This extremely effective example of documentary theater, relating the true stories of six individuals exonerated of their crimes while serving on death row, is perfectly timed to capitalize on both the current debate over capital punishment and the insatiable public thirst for true crime stories.

Hard-hitting, powerful and socially relevant, "The Exonerated," designed to be performed by a revolving cast of 10 in bare-bones style, is a far more dramatically satisfying (if not necessarily as commercially viable) example of the format than such previous pieces as "Love Letters" and "The Vagina Monologues." The show should provide a strong vehicle for many well-known and politically conscious performers in the years to come.

Co-authors Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen have based their text on taped interviews with six people released from death row (gleaned from 60 such interviews conducted across the country), as well as public documents, court transcripts, etc., relating to their stories. These subjects include Kerry Max Cook, who served 22 years in prison for the murder of a young woman with whom he once had a sexual fling; Gary Gauger, a farmer who was accused of murdering his parents and whose hypothetical description of what he might have done was used against him as a confession; Robert Earl Hayes, accused of raping and murdering a young woman despite the fact that she was clutching someone else's hair in her hand; Sunny Jacobs, who was hitching a ride with her husband from a friend who shot and killed two policeman while they were in the car; David Keaton, accused of a robbery in which a police officer was killed; and Delbert Tibbs, a black political activist charged with rape and murder even though he didn't match the description given by one of the victims.

The cast members, including such prominent performers as Richard Dreyfuss, Jill Clayburgh, Sara Gilbert and Jay O. Sanders, sit on stools during the 90-minute piece, alternating fragments of their characters' stories in the form of brief monologues. While most of actors play a single character, Gilbert and April Yvette Thompson each enact several roles, and Bruce Kronenberg and Philip Levy recite the lines of various judges, policemen, lawyers, etc.

The stories related are both compelling and deeply moving, and the talented actors embody their characters with the deep feeling and conviction that comes only from a strong connection to the material. Particularly effective are Dreyfuss' low-key turn as Cook, Charles Brown as Tibbs and Sanders as the befuddled Gauger.

Bob Balaban has staged the evening with clarity and simplicity, thankfully eschewing any ostentatious directorial tricks. At a recent news performance, several of the actual figures depicted were brought onstage after the curtain call in a stunning confluence of art and real life.

WRTN/WVOX by Lesley Alexander

This is Lesley Alexander with today’s off-Broadway Review.

Every once in awhile something riveting and exceptional happens in theatre. Such is the case with The Exonerated, a new play about people released from death row. Perhaps it’s because every word uttered in the piece is true and that the simple act makes the play truly chilling. It doesn’t hurt that the cast assembled is an extraordinary one for an off-Broadway house including Jay O. Sanders, Charles Brown, Richard Dreyfuss and Jill Clayburgh among ten actors. It is also impeccably directed by Bob Balaban.

Playwrights, Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, (using the model perfected by Anna Deavere Smith for documentary theatre), conducted dozens of interviews with those released from prison when their verdict of “death” was overturned. More time was spent pouring over court manuscripts and articles about individual cases. The information was then edited and condensed into six characters all of whom were exonerated. The result is a fascinating piece of drama.

The accounts are as similar as each is diverse. The cast is assembled as in a staged reading with stands for their scripts set before them and little more than lighting and sound effects to delineate time and place. The incredible impact comes from these remarkable stories and the powerful performances which propel them.

This is as fine an ensemble of players as you’re ever likely to see. Richard Dreyfuss plays Kerry Max Cook, a naïve young man who is convicted of murdering his neighbor. It seems he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and spends twenty-two years on death row until DNA evidence is used to release him. Jill Clayburgh portrays Sunny Jacobs. She and her two children were taken hostage by an armed gunman whom she knew only as an acquaintance. When police officers are killed the gunman turns the state’s evidence and fingers Sunny and her husband (who was subsequently electrocuted) while she sat on death row. Sixteen years after her conviction she was released when the gunman recanted. Charles Brown plays Delbert Tibbs, a brilliant young man whose only crime seems to be the color of his skin. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary he is also convicted until finally granted a new trial where the previous verdict is overturned.

I could go on and on with explanation of the individual information which came to bear on these cases but it won’t do justice to this magnificent theatrical experience. The drama here is all in the intricate details as well as the subtext. Lives ruined. Loves lost. Anger and despair are all captured in the telling with a surprising sprinkling of humor to make it all the more digestible for a mesmerized audience as the victims rise above their circumstances to lead productive lives.

Bob Balaban has obviously directed the piece knowing that less is more and as his actors quietly tell their tales the reality of it becomes an emotional catharsis for all. Dreyfuss, Brown, and Clayburgh each give carefully crafted performances as does the entire talented cast. There’s not a misstep among them. Brown, in particular brings a spectacular grace and sense of pride to his role.

It is a real horror story unfolding right before your eyes as you realize that the system might catch anyone in its web and that truth and justice seem to be mutually exclusive. At this time there are one hundred and two individuals whose death row convictions have been overturned. This play may have a profound affect on the long term use of the death penalty.

I urge you to come see this production. It will be something that theatre-goers will talk about for a long time to come. The Exonerated is in a limited run at 45 Bleecker Street.

For WRTN/WVOX this is Lesley Alexander.