PICTURES AT A NON-EXECUTION
By Jonathan Kalb
The Exonerated
By Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen
45 Bleecker Theater (at Lafayette)
(212) 307-4100
It was only a matter of time before reality theater
(or docudrama, if you prefer) found the subject of capital punishment.
Charlie Victor Romeo, back in 2000, was scripted entirely from
transcripts of "black-box" cockpit recordings made moments
before actual airplane crashes. The same year, The Laramie Project
came from testimonial interviews about a gruesome homophobic murder
in Wyoming. Anna Deavere Smith's most prominent impersonated- interviewee
pieces, in 1992 and 1993, were about deadly riots in Brooklyn and Los
Angeles. Reality theater (with important exceptions such as The
Vagina Monologues) has frequently traded on the dramatic appeal
of violent death--strongly implying that the taste for the form has
as much to do with gladiator games and public hangings as with sincere
pathos or noble curiosity about the complex nets of history.
From one perspective, The Exonerated
might be seen as the quintessence of this tradition. Constructed by
Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen primarily from interview-extracts with
six Americans released from death row after imprisonments ranging from
two to twenty-two years, its horrifying focus is the awful machinery
of state-administered death in the United States, with a healthy measure
of true-crime background information thrown in for our rubbernecking
pleasure. Bob Balaban has "staged" the piece as a reading,
with actors sitting on stools behind music stands with scripts--a "humble"
documentarian presentation that is crucial to the work's quiet power.
Oddly enough, allowing the material's factuality to speak for itself
enhances its sensationalism in the end. By the same token, the steady
flow of marquee names in the rotating cast--Richard Dreyfuss and Jill
Clayburgh among the first--makes the enterprise seem like a vital public
service (and ensures media coverage, of course). The Exonerated
has been running for five months at the 45 Bleecker Theater, and has
already been mounted in several other U.S. cities, also with stars.
For all this P.R. scaffolding, however, I found
that The Exonerated also had a strength of its own that melted
my cynicism about the opportunism and sensationalism of its form. For
one thing, the work presents an important twist: none of its protagonists
die. All are saved at the eleventh hour, for a variety of reasons. Sunny
Jacobs, convicted along with her husband of killing two policemen in
the 1970s, was released thirteen years after the real murderer confessed
(and a decade after her husband was executed). Gary Gauger, a mild-mannered
shopowner convicted of stabbing and nearly decapitating his parents,
was released after an appeals court ruled that his confession had been
coerced (evidence arose later pointing to a biker gang and its savage
initiation rites). Delbert Tibbs, a black hitchhiker convicted by an
all-white jury of raping a white girl and killing her white male companion,
was released after the prosecutor became convinced he was framed by
the police. Kerry Max Cook, a 17-year-old convicted of the rape and
mutilation-murder of a 21-year-old Texas woman, was granted three trials,
due to police and prosecutorial misconduct, and was freed after twenty-two
years when DNA evidence proved he couldn't have done it. The real subject
of the evening, in other words, isn't death itself but life lived under
the threat of imminent doom, not criminal violence per se but
rather the sickening loss of time and human potentiality that come from
overreaction to it.
The Exonerated offers the spectacle
of a public non-execution, multiplied six times. Making no
attempt to draw tragic or pseudo-tragic frames around essentially arbitrary
events, it avoids the trap of imposing forms and meanings that the material
doesn't really possess. Instead, the piece's very clever strategy is
to use what might be called the "porn-appeal" of real electrocutions,
gassings, and hangings as a lure, redirecting the public's fascination
with them toward fascination with their non-occurrence. Unlikely as
it may seem, this approach creates the conditions for meaningful political
thought. Not that anyone who has studied the subject of capital punishment
will find anything factually new in The Exonerated. The arbitrariness
of its protagonists, however, is a terrifying reminder that everyone
in America, citizen and non-citizen, is equally vulnerable to the forces
described: among them, police racism and ubiquitous political pressure
to identify culprits quickly for high-profile crimes. "I'm no different
from you," says Kerry Max Cook. "I wasn't a street thug, I
wasn't trash, I came from a good family, if it happened to me, man,
it can happen to anyone."
One feels this note of real vulnerability reverberating
through the audience as it leaves The Exonerated. The night
I attended, some people stayed for more than twenty minutes, chatting
with friends and strangers about tales that, in fictional form, would
likely have left them scampering off to the next titillation. The particular
knot left in the stomach here may be a private affair to begin with
(one can't help reflecting on what is important in one's life and cherishing
it anew), but it is married to an unmistakably political recognition:
that (especially with capital punishment having been unconstitutional
in America as recently as the 1970s), the circumstances behind the catastrophes
in question are--horribly and hopefully--under our control.