The punishment is supposed to fit the crime, but what if there is no crime, only punishment? Such is the tragedy of the six characters unfairly incarcerated in the new death-penalty-themed The Exonerated, a nonfiction work by young playwrights Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, which comes to the Wilbur Theatre this week in a production starring Marlo Thomas and Brian Dennehy.
In the spring of 2000, Blank and Jensen attended an anti-death-penalty conference at Columbia and heard a phone call from someone on death row in Illinois who shouldn’t have been there. Shaken and intrigued, the pair realized they wanted to hear more stories of people who had been wrongfully convicted and get them to the public. Off they went on an extended cross-country journey in search of the real-life "exonerated."
"They were young and sympathetic, and people were willing to talk to them," explains the play’s director, Bob Balaban. "People who’ve gone through this experience are very wary of being taken advantage of, which they had through the years. So they came back with 12 voices, which got whittled down to six."
The Exonerated is part mystery and part spoken-word collage in the style of Anna Deavere Smith. In the Boston production, Tony winner (for Death of a Salesman) Dennehy appears as Gary Gauger, an organic farmer unjustly imprisoned for the murder of his parents. That Girl Thomas plays Sunny Jacobs, a hapless young mother who was in the wrong place when a drug deal went sour and a policeman was murdered. (Her companion, Jesse Tafero, also wrongfully convicted, was the victim of one of the most spectacular botched electrocutions in the modern era.) The narratives in The Exonerated aren’t interwoven so much as on parallel tracks. Initially, the play consisted of just the voices of the victims of injustice, but Balaban sent the playwrights into the law libraries. "I said, ‘Let’s go back to court and have their depositions.’ Instead of hearing them describe it, you hear their trial."
Balaban was able to ensnare big-name actors like Richard Dreyfuss, Sara Gilbert, and Jill Clayburgh for the debut of the piece last fall in New York. "After we threw it on stage with a bunch of movie stars, people liked what they were hearing," he explains. "I shouldn’t say ‘liked.’ They were moved, they were fascinated, they were horrified." In the past months, many other "movie stars" have appeared in The Exonerated and will continue to do so in the future. (Of course, the play’s berth on the list of 10 best plays of 2002 in both the New York Times and Time magazine has been a boon as well.)
Balaban is quick to say that the purpose of The Exonerated is more pedagogical than polemic. "What we really have to say is, every time there’s a horrendous crime, the more likely it is that an innocent person will be convicted. In our six cases, every single jury member who voted to convict those people was 100 percent convinced they were putting away the right person." The Exonerated may actually be reaching people who count. So far, says Balaban, "We’ve got magistrates from London, a group of DAs from New Jersey, and we’ve been asked to do it by the Bar Association of Texas, and [Illinois] governor Ryan requested us to do it in Chicago."
During the course of the production, the director, who’s better known as an actor (Waiting for Guffman) and producer (Gosford Park), has had countless revelatory moments. "I think it’s crucially important that we all be on the same side," he says. "I don’t expect people to see the play and say, ‘Down with the death penalty.’ I expect people to see the play and say, ‘Oh, this is real. This is happening. We have to do something.’"
The Exonerated is at the Wilbur Theatre from January 21 through February 2. Tickets are $25 to $67, available at the Wilbur box office or through Ticketmaster at (617) 931-2787.
