Arts Review

The Exonerated

Zachary Scott Theatre Center Kleberg Stage, through May 7

Running time: 1 hr, 30 min

Our criminal justice system can just be so … inconvenient. I mean, that summons for jury duty invariably arrives at the worst possible time, and if we can't concoct some excuse to get out of it, then we lose a day or week or whatever to the damn court.

A day. A week. How about 71Ú2 years? Or 16? Or 22? When you listen to the stories in The Exonerated, tales of lives interrupted by that same justice system for three-quarters of a decade, for four presidential terms, for a span of life from birth through college graduation – time not merely lost but stolen by a system almost willfully blind to evidence establishing the innocence of individuals unfairly charged with ghastly murders, when you hear the stories of those stolen years spent wrongfully imprisoned on death row, then you come to realize that our concept of inconvenience at the hands of our criminal justice system doesn't even register on the charts.

Playwright Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen assembled these stories from interviews with the people who lived them, people who were convicted of crimes they didn't commit and spent anywhere from two years to two decades in prison awaiting execution before they could prove their innocence and be freed. Of the 60 people Blank and Jensen spoke to (and they know of more than 40 other cases of folks exonerated from death row), the couple chose six to represent on stage. Only one is a woman, but they are a mix of races and backgrounds, with nothing common to them all save their shared history of being unjustly convicted and incarcerated and finally pardoned. They could be anyone, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time without strong enough defenses when the system needed a scapegoat. Some of them speak of not knowing how the system worked, and based on what they tell us, part of how it works is by a presumption of guilt, a tool brought into play when things get stuck: when a case needs to be solved, when an elected official needs to prove his effectiveness, when a deal needs to be cut. It's old news, broadcast several times a night on cop and lawyer shows across the dial, but it still manages to jolt, perhaps because these cases are true.

When The Exonerated premiered in 2002, it was without theatrical embellishment; actors in street clothes read from scripts on music stands. But for this Zachary Scott Theatre Center production, director Dave Steakley has labored mightily to give the play a theatrical dimension. It's not that he doesn't have faith in the stories to move us; I suspect it has more to do with a desire to engage all our senses in conjuring these people's hard experiences, as when some tell of being browbeaten by police officers during their interrogations and one by one stand alone in a searing white spotlight provided by designer Jason Amato; it's isolating and blinding and physically punishing to the point that we feel that harrowing third-degree in our bones. Or when the actors lie down, each in a two-by-five-foot rectangle of light, the width of a narrow prison cot, to help us grasp the confinement of that cell. Or just when the actors file in and stand before the cinder-block wall of Michael Raiford's set; it's the slow, single-file march of prisoners, and the wall rises above their heads, offering them only a strip of blue sky they can barely see and will never reach. All this draws us more deeply into their world, where the injustice echoes loudly and never dies away. All seven members of the ensemble certainly do their part to communicate the uncertainty and pain of the six whose stories are shared here, but they do more than play the victim; in lightning turns, they also portray the racist cops, the zealous prosecutors, and the narrow-minded judges who bear responsibility for the theft of so much time from these people.

In the end, we spend only about 15 minutes on each of these cases, less time than we get with a single defendant on an episode of Law and Order, certainly less time than it takes to be excused from the jury pool. Can you spare 15 minutes for someone who lost 22 years? It might change your view of our criminal justice system for a lifetime.