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.
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