The Exonerated click here for show times
The Exonerated is a powerful new play about six innocent survivors of death row. Over the summer of 2000, playwrights Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen traveled across the United States, interviewing 40 former death row prisoners who had been sentenced to death, spent anywhere from 2 to 22 years on death row, and were eventually found innocent and freed by the state. Their verbatim interviews and individual court documents form the core of The Exonerated.
This show is suitable for most audiences.
Not appropriate for
children.
Review by Tony Savarese: I saw
this play when it was in Fort Worth in which Lyle Lovett & Kathleen Turner
performed.
It was extreemly moving and affected me more than any other movie or
performance I had ever seen. Throughout the play it is demonstrated
how profound and powerful peoples pre-conceptions are and how it adversely
effects even the most educated peoples logical thought processes and
biases. The play also included one of the most famous executions that
took place in the United States. It was that of Jessie Defaro in Florida,
when the electric chair did not function properly. It took 15 minutes to
kill him. This is reminiscent of the recent film "The Green Mile".
I was shocked to learn that Jessie Defaro and his wife, also on Death
Row, were both exonerated. They caught the real killer 17 years after the
crime. It was too late for Jessie and it took another year before they
released his wife. In closing, one of the charactors explains that we
live in a great country but sometimes we have to look at something bad.
If not, it will never be fixed.
more comments by Saundra Gordon
