Spotlight on the death penalty - drama about capital punishment

After a recent performance of Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen's documentary drama, The Exonerated, actor-entertainer Ben Vereen, who appears in the play, signed poetry books in the lobby of the Bleeker Theater in New York City. The poetry books were not Vereen's. He was autographing the writings of the individual he portrays in the play, Delbert Tibbs, who spent eight years on death row. When I purchased my copy of Tibbs's Songs Singing Songs, I asked Vereen why he decided to participate in the play.

"The message is so important," Vereen stated emphatically.

Along with Vereen, other well-known actors and actresses have appeared in The Exonerated. Among the players who have graced the stage since it began its run in New York in October are Tim Robbins, Robert Vaughn, Susan Sarandon, Connie Britton, Brian Dennehy, and Peter Gallagher.

Over the past three decades, 102 individuals have been exonerated from death row in America. These are individuals who were not freed on legal technicalities or because evidence was lost. These men and women did not commit their crimes. Yet somehow, they were arrested, convicted, and sentenced to die, and some came awfully close to execution. Some lost more than ten or twenty years of their lives.

This fall, more people will finally be able to experience The Exonerated. So far, with the exception of a few short runs in cities like Boston, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., the play has made its powerful statement on life, death, and justice mostly in New York City. In October, it will begin a twenty-five-city tour of the United States. Orlando, New Orleans, Seattle, and the most efficient state-sponsored killing zone of all, Texas (Fort Worth), will get a chance to be challenged by the play's message.

The Exonerated is a simple piece of drama. It is six independent stories woven into one documentary tale. Five men. One woman. All were on death row in the United States of America at one time. Their own words make up the script of the play.

"Every word you hear comes from the people represented on stage," a voice announces at the beginning.

The stage is dark, and there are ten high black chairs that look like bar stools. Eight chairs are in line right next to each other. Then there are two other chairs on each end of the stage that sit higher than the other eight. Except for occasional sounds (music, gunshots, jail bars slamming), this is the show. Ten actors take the seats--some have dual parts--and the journey through life, death, justice, and then life again in America begins. There hasn't really ever been anything like The Exonerated in American theater mainly because of the subject matter and the approach taken by the writers.

Playwrights Blank and Jensen, now married, insist they are actors and not writers. But they do have a story that explains how two struggling New York actors tried their hand at the literary genre often described as the most difficult to master.

"We were at a conference at Columbia University in the spring of 2000 in a workshop about the 'Death Row 10,'" Blank begins. "'The Death Row 10' were a group of individuals in Illinois who had been tortured by members of the Chicago police and forced into confessing to crimes they did not commit. We were at the workshop on those cases, and one of the guys on death row calls by phone and he begins to tell his story."

She relates how in the middle of the individual's call the prison guards came and cut off the phone call. "It was a very emotional moment," she says. "The whole room was crying."

Inspired by the experience and wanting to bring the personal nature of it to others who were not normally concerned with such issues, the two began typing notes to each other on how to do it.

A few months later, Blank and Jensen went on the road to interview twenty individuals who had been exonerated. They were searching for the soul of that fateful day at the workshop at Columbia. By October 2000, on the eve of George Bush's controversial ascendancy to the Presidency, they had enough text written to do a series of readings of a version of the play at 45 Bleecker Theater in New York City. They pushed themselves through seventeen-hour days to enjoy three powerful nights of readings at the Bleecker. Yet they both sensed at the time that it was not enough, despite the positive feedback they received.

"We realized we had to tell the story more fully," Blank said. "We began to go into the court transcripts." Blank estimates that they read 250,000 pages of court transcripts all over the country. "Every place we visited, everyone thought we were law students," she said. With the assistance of defense attorneys for many of the exonerated and others connected to the cases, they eventually spliced together a free-flowing, highly emotional saga detailing the destruction of six ordinary lives.

Aesthetically, the key to The Exonerated is the never-ending testimonials. It feels like something on PBS's Frontline, only there is no narrator. The stage lights pop on and shine upon an actor. That person begins to speak, and the knowledge that the words are part of a real interview with a living, breathing person engulfs you.