The Exonerated

Blank and Jensen’s documentary-style evocation of the lives of five men and one woman ultimately freed from death row has received Vagina Monologues–style celebrity treatment elsewhere. Raven’s spare and gripping production befits its arrival in a center of anti–death penalty activism. The play is unabashedly direct in its political import, and one leaves the theater convinced that many more such stories haunt the nation’s prisons. Restrained and nuanced performances, particularly by Harmon as prison bard Delbert Tibbs, concentrate attention on the stories of injustice Blank and Jensen have collected.

The show’s primary flaw follows from its serial approach. The play’s running time allows a little more than 15 minutes per prisoner. A few stories get more attention, like the saga of Kerry Max Cook, arrested for the murder of a woman he had seen once months earlier, and others in return get less. The result is a somewhat hazy impression of repeated slipshod investigations, lopsided trials, death-house tribulations and final vindication. Compared to the chilling and methodical procedures of Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line, which remains the finest treatment of the subject, The Exonerated feels underdeveloped. A more detailed examination of two or three of these stories would also leave the audience with fewer loose threads at the end of the night. Nevertheless, this remains a searing indictment of the criminal-justice system and its ways of doing business, and a tribute to six individuals who fought their way out of a state-sponsored death.—John Beer