I saw The Exonerated last night here in San Francisco. Robin Williams headlined. Deeply disturbing but a must-see.
(And it was topical for me. In my new DNA book, I have a whole chapter dedicated to death row inmated exonerated by DNA evidence. In my interview with DNA pioneer James Watson, he says this is the single most important outcome of his double helix work.)
Below is a review from nytheatre.com. The author captures it.
There is much to recommend Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen's new docudrama The Exonerated: fine direction, excellent acting, and the edification that comes from seeing a good story told well.
Taken verbatim from court transcripts, depositions, and interviews, The Exonerated tells the true stories of six people who were wrongly accused and convicted of murder, and spent many years after that on death row before finally being found innocent and freed.
Blank and Jensen's considerable achievement is not so much one of writing, but of editing. They have mined their source materials for what they need to tell their story—which is more about the loss of time than the morality of the death penalty—and fused everything together into a seamless, compelling whole. Not an easy task, considering the amount of material at their disposal, but one which the authors pull off beautifully.
The impact of The Exonerated is made more palpable by director Bob Balaban's decision to stage the play as a reading. Nothing stands between the actors and the audience except ten chairs and music stands, facing front. The lack of artifice helps the audience absorb the play's full weight.
The Exonerated is also served well by a splendid cast headed by Richard Dreyfuss and Jill Clayburgh. He is effectively quiet and low-key as Kerry Max Cook, a wayward Texan imprisoned for the murder of a neighbor whose apartment he'd only been in once. Clayburgh brings the proper energy and outlook to Sunny Jacobs, a hippie convicted (along with her husband) of killing two cops. David Brown, Jr. and Curtis McClarin are also powerful as Robert Earl Hayes and David Keaton, respectively, two African-American men who had the bad fortune of being African-American men in the wrong place at the wrong time. Jay O. Sanders brings an earthy, shambling grace to Gary Gauger, a farmer wrongly accused of murdering his parents, and Charles Brown shines as Delbert Tibbs, an African-American hitchhiker accused of murdering a white teenage girl. The yearning and regret they convey in telling each of their stories, and ruminating on the amount of time they had taken away from them, brings the resonance of The Exonerated home with smooth, graceful force.
David Robbins provides good support with his music and sound design, and Sara J. Tosetti's costumes are both wonderfully telling and unobtrusive.
With all of that going for it, what other examples could possibly be invoked in praising The Exonerated? At the performance I attended, several of the actual exonerated were also in attendance. Moved by their stories, my mother, who accompanied me to the show, went up and spoke to each and every single one of them without hesitation after the show. Ample proof that The Exonerated is not only a stimulating intellectual experience, but a satisfying emotional one as well.
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