The Exonerated

While in prison her husband, who was wrongly convicted with her, was executed by electric chair in an undertaking so hideous and mismanaged it took 13 minutes for him to die as flames flew from his head and smoke poured from his ears.

The Exonerated, written by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, tells Sunny's story and the story of five other innocent survivors of Death Row, in a poignant piece of verbatim theatre, which exemplifies exactly why capital punishment in America should be abolished.

Taken from interviews with survivors, this production is simply staged with all ten actors sitting on chairs facing the audience, the spotlight picking them out, when it's their turn to talk.

The production benefits from Riverside Studios' relative intimacy as a venue. Sitting face to face with the performers, you are transfixed as they wring out horrific tales of wrongful arrest and lives spent trapped in the machinations of a perverse system, and how it haunts them still.

There is enough power in each of these accounts for the production not to need the star-studded cast that is fronting the London run. Yet, as in the US The Exonerated has proved a magnet for big names; Stockard Channing as Sunny and Aidan Quinn as Kerry Max Cook, a Texan wrongly convicted of murder, were a tour de force in the production I saw and with Danni Glover and Sex And The City's Kristin Davis, also set to feature as part of the show's rolling cast one would except this high standard to continue.

But, as I said, this show doesn't need to rely on having some of Hollywood's big hitters taking part in order to get people to sit up and pay attention. Each of the stories are travesties, each one a deeply affecting miscarriage of justice. And none more so than that of Sunny's; a sweet, caring woman, wronged in the most atrocious of ways, who somehow emerges from this trauma not bitter or angry but serene and dignified, her life is an anthem to the power of the human spirit to rise above the most abominable circumstances.

In the US, where this show ran for nearly two years off-Broadway before embarking on a national tour, the press it generated functioned as an exercise in consciousness raising and the production still stands as a damning indictment of the American Penal system, showing the death penalty for what it is: a vile, archaic sanction and the final affront in justice system infested with institutional racism and right-wing extremism.

Yet, though this production deals primarily with man's inhumanity to man, it is also strangely uplifting and life affirming, shot through with humour, frankness and forgiveness.

However, what it never really touches on is why this type of sentence exists or persists, how the innocent can be better served or how total abolition could be brought about. Hopefully the answer to all these questions will be The Exonerated's long lasting legacy.

share Tweet