Upcoming casts will include Jill Clayburgh (April 1-6), Richard Masur (April 8 -13), Jill Clayburgh and Frank McCourt (April 15-20), Masur and Marlo Thomas (April 29 - May 4). Artists and dates are subject to change.
CHICAGO
'The Exonerated'
at the Shubert Theatre
By Michael Phillips
Ripping something from the headlines and putting it on stage guarantees a certain ripped-from-the-headlines topicality, but beyond that, no guarantees. A docudrama can flounder in noble intentions as easily as fiction.
"The Exonerated," however, does its chosen genre proud. In 90 conventionally shaped but steadily compelling minutes, this slice of life ; and of lives that cheated state-sanctioned death ; lays out stories of five men and one woman falsely accused of murder, condemned to death but eventually freed, their wrongful convictions overturned like so many pancakes.
The play by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen has become a magnet for film and television stars. For the two-week Shubert Theatre engagement Brian Dennehy and Marlo Thomas topline the cast of 10. Dennehy and Thomas fare just fine, with Dennehy's eloquently spare approach especially valuable in this context. What I didn't expect was just how spectacular everyone else is in "The Exonerated," working from interviews, court transcripts and the like. If you think there's not much to delivering real-life material honestly but forcefully, this ensemble will correct your impression.
Seated on a stool alongside his fellow actors, in director Bob Balaban's no-fuss staging, Dennehy plays Gary Gauger, an Illinois organic vegetable farmer wrongfully convicted of killing his parents on the basis of a "vision statement." Interrogating officers strong-armed the distraught Gauger into concocting a hypothetical scenario, a what-if relaying how Gauger might have murdered if he chose to. The so-called confession was enough to imprison him ; until the real killer confessed, years later.
Her voice in a quavery lower register reminiscent of Tippi Hedren's, Thomas portrays Sunny Jacobs, convicted with her common-law husband of murdering two policemen. The real killer plea-bargained his way into three consecutive life sentences.
And so all the stories go. Though it takes a while for "The Exonerated" to establish everybody's background and terrible, ill-fated luck, brought on by a blood-simple justice system wide open to terrible abuses, once the stories catch hold you're hooked.
The collective portrait of American racism, from jury selection to white-on-black police brutality, is impossible to ignore. William Jay Marshall's Delbert Tibbs, an exonerated African-American with a poetic and philosophical streak amazingly unmarred by bitterness, speaks movingly near the end of his re-entry into freedom. "You can't allow yourself to feel too much," he says of prison life. "So when you get out, you've gotta practice. I had to practice a bunch to be human again."
Ed Blunt's Robert Earl Hayes, with Tracie Thoms' Georgia Hayes in perfect counterpoint, makes the very most of a highlight: Hayes' letter to prison higher-ups, detailing the venal behavior of the guards. In Blunt's reading, the battle between reason and rage, terse persuasion and blind anguish, makes something indelible out of the concept of lost time. As the real-life Sunny Jacobs said Tuesday night on the Shubert stage, after the actors took their bows: "Life can be short." It should be lived as purposefully as possible in a society, the play argues, deserving of better justice than this.
Everyone's excellent: Bruce MacVittie's remarkably affecting Kerry Max Cook; Johanna Day's just-right, easygoing Sue Gauger; Chad L. Coleman's searching David Keaton; and, though the script pushes them toward caricature, Larry Block and Jim Bracchitta as a variety of legal weasels and louts. In addition to Jacobs, Thomas introduced the real-life Gary and Sue Gauger after Tuesday's curtain call. Such intersections of life and art rarely fail to move an audience. But here in Illinois, with departing Gov. George Ryan last month commuting an entire Row of Death to life without parole, it's moving in ways beyond the ordinary.
Justice system takes a beating
February 6, 2003
BY HEDY WEISS,THEATER CRITIC
The most dramatic moment at the opening-night performance Tuesday of "The Exonerated"--the patchwork docudrama about wrongly accused Death Row inmates--occurred immediately after the 90-minute piece ended.
In an eerie conjunction of art and real life, two of the play's subjects walked onstage of the Shubert Theatre and hugged Brian Dennehy and Marlo Thomas--the actors who had just portrayed them.
One of those victims, Sunny Jacobs, seemed indomitable and unbeaten. Bright, upbeat and talkative, with gray hair and a trim figure, she looked like an aging hippie. In fact, she was living the hippie life, when, in 1976, with her two young children in tow, she tagged along with Jesse, her common-law husband, and Rhodes, his bad-news pal, and ended up being wrongly accused of shooting two cops in Florida. Rhodes, a career criminal and the actual gunman, cagily eluded the death penalty. Jesse was fried (almost literally) in a botched electrocution that had to be repeated three times. Sunny (whose saucy naivete is brightly captured by Thomas) spent 14 years behind bars.
Gary Gauger, another victim of flawed justice depicted in "The Exonerated," was an organic farmer from northern Illinois who was arrested almost immediately after discovering the bodies of his murdered parents. While still in a traumatized state, he was cajoled into giving a hypothetical account of how he might have committed the murder (neatly recounted here by Dennehy); that conversation was used as a confession at his trial.
Gauger, dressed in a suit and tie somewhat at odds with his long, shaggy gray beard, seemed more marked by his ordeal, although backed by the gentle presence of his wife, Sue, he warmed to the Shubert audience. He offered vigorous thanks to Larry Marshall and his team of law students at Northwestern University who took up his case and secured his freedom.
"The Exonerated," the creation of Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, a husband-and-wife team who spent the summer of 2000 interviewing 40 former Death Row prisoners nationwide, is rife with such stories of justice gone amok. Under the effectively minimalist direction of Bob Balaban, Thomas and Dennehy, along with the eight other skilled actors who join them on black leather stools onstage, give human form to the deeply flawed justice system that continues to impose a very problematic penalty.
The failings of this system have been exposed with great clarity in recent months as former Gov. George Ryan commuted the sentences of prisoners on the state's Death Row. This is not, of course, the same thing as exonerating the innocent. Nor did it supply an answer to whether capital punishment will continue. But along with the true stories in "The Exonerated" (whose script is drawn verbatim from transcripts, court documents and interviews), Ryan's actions focused a strong light on the many forms of abuse that leave the wrong people sitting on Death Row.
Those abuses include the suppression of evidence, the corruption and poor training of forensics experts, the lack of good legal counsel for the poor, the blatant flouting of accepted police and legal procedures, the issue of racism, the use of fear and coercion and a dangerous lack of knowledge by the accused over their rights.
Among the cases highlighted here are those of Robert Earl Hayes (played by Ed Blunt with just the right angry edginess and resentment), a young African-American racetrack employee framed for raping and murdering a white woman, and David Keaton (portrayed with touching and ultimately shaken belief by Chad L. Coleman), an 18-year-old African American with aspirations to the ministry, who was charged with murdering his grandmother and convicted on a coerced confession and misidentification by white eyewitnesses. Racism and homelessness played a part in the conviction of Delbert Tibbs (the neatly charismatic William Jay Marshall), a politically radical African-American poet picked up for rape and murder, who won his freedom (and who now lives in Chicago). The murder conviction of the 22-year-old Kerry Max Cook (whose troubled innocence is nicely suggested by Bruce MacVittie) was fed by homophobia; during his 23 years behind bars, he suffered mightily for this unsubstantiated sexual labeling before he was cleared by DNA evidence. If many of the finer points of each of these cases are blurred in the fragmented structure of "The Exonerated," the overall inadequacies of "the system" are deftly revealed. Most touching perhaps is the coda, in which we get a sense of how the exonerated cope in their post-release lives. There are scars, to be sure, and not all of them on the surface.
THEATER REVIEW
'THE EXONERATED' RECOMMENDED
WHEN : Through Feb. 16
BOSTON
Marlo Thomas jumps at chance to put `the system' on trial
by Robert Nesti
Monday, January 20, 2003
Marlo Thomas has come a long way since ``That Girl,'' the popular series from the '60s in which she played one of the first single, independent women on network television.
Since then she has won four Emmys and one Golden Globe for her television work, developed the groundbreaking children's series ``Free To Be . . . You and Me'' (that won her a Peabody Award) and written best-selling books for children and adults, the most recent of which, ``The Right Words at the Right Time,'' landed on the New York Times best-seller list after its first week of publication last spring. Along with husband Phil Donahue, Thomas has a high profile as a liberal activist.
She also has a long commitment to the theater, having made her first appearance in summer stock at age 17. Between her television and film commitments, she has appeared on Broadway and in regional theaters in such plays as ``The Shadow Box,'' ``Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'' ``Six Degrees of Separation'' and, most recently, ``The Vagina Monologues.''
``I feel most at home on the stage,'' Thomas said from New York recently after a rehearsal of ``The Exonerated,'' the play she will be appearing in at the Wilbur Theatre in Boston starting tomorrow.
``You really do get to tell the story - the whole story - which you don't get to do in film or television,'' she said.
With ``The Exonerated,'' Thomas has found a vehicle to merge both her commitments to social activism and to working in the theater.
The play, by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, may be one of the most socially relevant works to come along in some time. Taken from transcripts and interviews with exonerated death-row inmates, it offers a powerful indictment of capital punishment and the legal system.
Staged simply with 10 actors standing in front of lecterns, the play comprises an anthology of interviews that tells the stories of six former death-row inmates found innocent of their crimes in a documentarylike fashion.
``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,'' wrote Ben Brantley in the New York Times after the play opened off-Broadway last October.
Since then ``The Exonerated'' has become a much-lauded success, due in part to the succession of celebrities, such as Thomas, who have appeared in it. For the Boston engagement, Thomas is joined by Brian Dennehy, who returns to to town for the first time since re-creating his Tony Award-winning portrayal of Willy Loman in ``Death of a Salesman'' two years ago.
Thomas took the role when the play's director, Bob Balaban, (who recently co-produced and was featured in ``Gosford Park'') asked her to read the script.
``It's such a good play,'' she said. ``It's powerful, and as much as it is about the death penalty, it's about the corruption of the system. And it makes you question nearly every conviction that you heard. It made me want to be on a jury, which I never expected I'd say.''
Part of the problem, she feels, is with prosecutors.
``I think there's something wrong with the system that many, many prosecutors, and certainly the ones in this play, would rather somebody be convicted, or even go to their death, than lose a conviction,'' she said.
In the play, Thomas plays Sunny Jacobs, a Florida woman who was convicted, along with her husband, of the 1976 murder of two police officers. Jacobs spent 16 years behind bars for a crime she didn't commit, five of those in solitary confinement, where she lost use of her vocal cords. She was released in 1992 when withheld evidence was revealed. Her husband wasn't so fortunate - he was executed in 1990 in a gruesome manner when the electric chair malfunctioned.
``A case like hers really brings home what's wrong with the system,'' Thomas said.
Yet upon meeting Jacobs, the actress was surprised by her lack of bitterness.
``I was so impressed and moved by how forgiving and sweet she is,'' Thomas said. ``To think that she had 16 years of (her) life taken from her. I asked how it was possible that she wasn't bitter - how could she bring herself to this point where she didn't have the feeling for revenge. And she said that there is this speech in the play where she says that there's a power out there that's greater than the system, and if she had faith in it, it would answer her.
``And I just thought it was just brilliant, and it was so true for all of our lives, that if we come out of a situation and you continue to labor it and nosh on it and have it destroy you, you'll hang onto that decision for the rest of your life. She made that decision on the day she got out that they (the system) wouldn't get one more minute of her life.''
What Thomas likes most about the play is how it energizes its audience to think about the criminal justice system.
``That was what makes doing this play so exciting - because it is about something real that is happening in our world, and it is something that we are noshing on and thinking about, and need to rethink,'' she said. ``You can feel people's minds thinking. It's powerful because it is the truth, and people come with all kinds of ideas in their heads. Some of them have made up their mind about the death penalty; some aren't sure, but whatever they feel, one side or the other, they go out with new thought and that is what's exciting.''
``The Exonerated,'' tomorrow through Feb. 2 at the Wilbur Theatre, 246 Tremont St., Boston. Tickets: $23-$65. Call 617-931-2787.
STAGE REVIEWS
`Exonerated' puts human face on issue of capital punishment
by Terry Byrne
Wednesday, January 22, 2003
``The Exonerated,'' Wilbur Theatre, last night, through Feb. 2.
The stage is unadorned, and the straight line of 10 chairs, each with a music stand in front of it, seems formal. But within the first few minutes of ``The Exonerated,'' now at the Wilbur Theatre, formality evaporates. So does the sense that the 10 people up on stage are actors, so powerful are the stories and so subtle are the performances.
``The Exonerated'' is essentially a documentary, chronicling the stories of six death row inmates who were wrongly convicted of crimes, finally found innocent and released. Four other actors play a variety of supporting roles. The text comes from interviews playwrights Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen conducted with the exonerated, along with court documents. But although the details of the experiences are shocking and surreal, ``The Exonerated'' never feels like a pedantic lecture on the death penalty.
What makes the play so riveting is Blank and Jensen's ability to weave these stories together so smoothly that what emerges are a series of wrenching portraits of people just trying to live their lives, even through the horror of what's happened to them.
Each of the six tell their stories in turn, offering insight into a haphazard criminal justice system along with vivid details of the crimes for which they were convicted. The play has been advertised as starring Brian Dennehy and Marlo Thomas, but it's impressive how quickly the actors disappear into the characters they portray.
Dennehy, whose strong stage presence made him electrifying in ``Death of a Salesman,'' here is low-key and remarkably easy-going as Gary Gauger, an organic farmer convicted of murdering his parents. Even as he describes the murders and recounts the 12-hour interrogation by the police, Dennehy communicates Gauger's gentle nature.
Thomas recounts the story of Sunny Jacobs, who, along with her husband, was convicted for murdering two policemen. As Sunny begins to tell her tale, Thomas is meek, frightened, fragile, as Sunny tells the police, ``I haven't done anything but the wrong choice of people.'' Even though a confession from the real killer proving their innocence was in the hands of the authorities, Sunny's husband was electrocuted.
At one point as Sunny tells her story, another actor reads a letter from her husband, the communication and connection Sunny lived for. One line of the letter reads, ``You're my woman, as close as my breath.''
That poetic simplicity brings these stories home in ways no fictional account could. As we listen to the stories of Robert Earl Hayes, David Keaton, Kerry Max Cook, Delbert Tibbs, we are struck more by the spirit within them that helped them survive, the humiliation, the electric chair always waiting nearby.
Director Bob Balaban keeps the focus on the stories, with a minimum of sound effects and the simplest lighting. The only actor he allows a simple gesture is Chad L. Coleman, who tells the story of David Keaton, who lost his faith along with his freedom. As Coleman reaches out his arm, as if to reach out to God, the effect is startling.
The stories are framed by excerpts from the poetry and philosophy of Delbert Tibbs, whose efforts to avoid stereotypes and work for what's right keeps us on track even as we're gasping at the bizarre events that have sent these people to death row. Just when you think you can't hear anymore, the stories turn inward, to what sustained them, and then outward to their release.
Every one of the actors delivers enormously affecting performances, without ever getting in the way of the story. More than struggling for their freedom and vindication, what we're left with at the end of ``The Exonerated'' is the sense of six people who struggled to hold onto hope.
At the end of last night's performance, Cook appeared on stage to thank the audience. Seeing the man behind one of the stories was just one more way of putting a face on the startling humanity of death row.
'Exonerated' survives its predictability
By Ed Siegel, Globe Staff, 1/22/2003
Perhaps the best moral argument in favor of the death penalty is that those who commit the heinous deed of taking innocent people's lives lose the right to that most precious of gifts themselves.
''The Exonerated,'' the unabashed anti-death penalty play that opened in Boston last night, takes that logic and stands it on its head - namely, a country that commits the heinous deed of taking innocent people's lives loses whatever moral authority it had to institute the death penalty in the first place.
And one would have to say, after 90 minutes of wrenching if predictable testimony from six actors playing death-row inmates who were exonerated, that authors Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen make a forceful case against execution. Add to that the uncovering in Illinois of coerced testimony and planted evidence, and one would have to be a right-wing ideologue or, well, president of the United States not to think twice about capital punishment.
This is not to say that ''The Exonerated'' is great theater. The words are testimony, not dialogue - all the words are taken from legal proceedings or interviews - and Blank and Jensen are authors, not playwrights. Their most theatrical precedents are Anna Deavere Smith and Eve Ensler, whose theater pieces are also culled from interviews, and Moises Kaufman's ''Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde.'' But in those cases, there is an admission on the part of the authors of at least some ambiguity.
Still, ''The Exonerated,'' precisely because of its lack of ambiguity and its simplicity of speech, is powerful theater. In presenting the cases of seven people who were wrongfully convicted - sometimes out of stupidity, more often out of knavery on the part of state prosecutors and police - the play uses the stuff of simple dreams to weave a nightmare scenario about capital punishment run amok.
How do six actors play seven characters? The most eloquent dialogue is the silence that comes from the person who isn't on stage, a man executed before the real killer confessed. As for those who are onstage, the stars are Brian Dennehy and Marlo Thomas, but this is ensemble acting of a very high caliber. Ed Blunt's Robert Earl Hayes is particularly riveting.
Bob Balaban directs with a sophisticated sense of understatement. The histrionics are carefully placed and usually executed (no pun intended) by the two men, Larry Block and Jim Bracchitta, playing a variety of prosecutors (and other parts). Balaban and the authors also make the point of the disproportionate representation of African-Americans on death row as three of the six former prisoners are black.
The play could use more of those crucial things that make drama great, like less predictability and more verbal dexterity. William Jay Marshall does deliver Delbert Tibbs's poetry with panache, but more often the recitation of broken lives can sound like a broken record. Since we know these are all innocent people, there's little real drama in this drama.
Given that, it's all the more impressive that ''The Exonerated'' is so articulate, so emotionally binding. The sins of omission and commission on the part of public officials is a blot on the American character. ''The Exonerated'' is a powerful argument for removing the stain.
The Exonerated
Play in one act by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen
Directed by: Bob Balaban.
Production design, Tom Ontiveros.
Costumes, Sara J. Tosetti.
Sound, David Robbins.
Presented by Broadway in Boston.
At the Wilbur Theatre, through Feb. 2.
The Exonerated tells a shocking story
BY CAROLYN CLAY
The Exonerated
By Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen. Directed by Bob Balaban. Production design by Tom Ontiveros. Costume coordination by Sara J. Tosetti. Sound-effects design by David Robbins. With Brian Dennehy, Marlo Thomas, Larry Block, Ed Blunt, Jim Bracchitta, Chad L. Coleman, Johanna Day, Bruce MacVittie, William Jay Marshall, and Tracie Thoms. At the Wilbur Theatre through February 2.
With its actors mounted on stools and their scripts propped on music stands, The Exonerated is simple enough to be presented in a prison ? except that it might start a riot. The eyesight of Justice is very much in question in this powerful piece of agitprop stitched together by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen and staged by Bob Balaban. It?s been presented Off Broadway since October with a rotating cast of name actors and unknowns; now it?s on limited tour. Brian Dennehy and Marlo Thomas supply the star wattage for the Boston engagement of the piece, which, culled from interviews of 40 ex-death-row residents who were wrongly convicted of capital crimes and later proved innocent, tells the Kafka-esque stories of six persons.
Not everyone can exit this play and commute the sentences of 167 condemned inmates, as outgoing Illinois governor George Ryan did after seeing The Exonerated (other potent inßuences included a three-year review of capital punishment in his state). But the stories deftly pulled word-for-word from interviews and trial transcripts and then orchestrated by Blank and Jensen are shocking enough to make even Dubya think twice about pulling that switch. The troubling thing about the death penalty, after all, is that you can?t call back a mistake ? unless, as in the case of these exonerated, the victims have whiled away from two to 22 years on death row but have not yet been killed. (Jesse Tafero, the partner of the only woman represented in The Exonerated, Sunny Jacobs, was not so lucky; the victim, with Sunny, of a botched verdict, he was also the victim of a botched execution that set his head on fire.)
The Exonerated is less a play than interwoven testimony, rife with such small cruelties as an electric chair placed in full view of recreating prisoners. There are 10 stools on stage, in a crowded row before a black background, the two stools on either end perched on platforms. On the floor are the actors representing the six exonerated and two women who serve as three wives; elevated are two men who enact assorted cops, lawyers, and judges in the flashbacks to the proceedings that landed the title characters where they didn?t belong. Although one does not wish to indict the South, only the laid-back Illinois organic farmer played by Dennehy (looking so much like a shoo-in for Ted Kennedy: The Later Years that it?s uncanny) was convicted and jailed north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Blank and Jensen do not, however, stack the deck. Whereas race is a factor in some of the convictions, as it is in the play, Jacobs and the play?s most poignant Þgure, a railroaded Texan named Kerry Max Cook, who spent 22 years being brutalized on death row before DNA evidence proved him innocent, are white.
Spirituality, along with human resilience, looms large in The Exonerated. A former aspiring preacher named David Keaton (Chad L. Coleman) who was wrongly convicted of murder at 18 can?t decide whether he?s lost his faith or become a weather-controlling Jesus. And the docudrama?s folk-wise center is self-described child a? the ?60s Delbert Tibbs (William Jay Marshall), a lapsed seminarian who was doing a Jack Kerouac thing when he was pinned with rape and murder in Florida.
Tibbs supplies the play with both his own wintry poetry and such blunt observations as if you?re accused of a sex crime in the South and you?re black, you probably shoulda done it, you know, ?cause your ass is gonna be guilty. He also points out, toward the end, that patriotism isn?t necessarily a kneejerk flag-waving thing: I know America gets tired of all these people talking about what they don?t have and what?s wrong with the country. Folks say, ?Well, what?s right with the country?? Well, what the fuck? To make things better, we ain?t interested in what?s right with it, we?re interested in what?s wrong with it. You don?t say, ?What?s right with my car??
In the touring production at the Wilbur, there is little to look at but the acting, which is conversational yet arresting. Dennehy is low-key believable rather than brashy as farmer Gary Gauger, who was convicted on the basis of a hypothetical vision statement presented in court as a confession; and Thomas?s Sunny is too silky. But Ed Blunt brings fire and humor to Robert Earl Hayes, an African-American horse trainer wrongly convicted of the murder of a white racetrack groupie; and Tracie Thoms nails his sassy wife. And were the excellent Bruce MacVittie, zippy yet vulnerable as the scarred and sensitive Cook, to be accused of stealing the show, he would have to plead guilty.
