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The Exonerated
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
”The Exonerated.” Through March 29.
The verdict: A harrowing, eventually human-affirming look at six people wrongly sent to death row.
The magnanimous spirit of Sunny Jacobs, a woman who unjustly spent much of her life on death row, illuminates “The Exonerated.”
Strikingly portrayed by Parks Stamper as a vital, affirming free spirit, she stands in triumph at the climax of the documentary play based on the true stories of six innocent people sent to death row.
“I’m planting my seed everywhere,” Sunny says, in celebrating her “joyous” moment of long-delayed freedom. Both defiant and sweetly forgiving, she tosses her head as if taking in great gulps of air.
Falsely convicted of murder along with her husband, Jesse, who was brutally killed in a malfunctioning electric chair, she says that her “living memorial” will be that “she didn’t get crushed.” Still, recalling the productive years wasted in prison, she’s suddenly shaken by a sob.
Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen’s anti-death-penalty play, performed last year at Georgia Tech’s Ferst Theater with Lynn Redgrave in the Sunny Jacobs role, exposes legal incompetence, inequities of class and race and justice-system violence. It will come as no surprise that the South once again stands accused for its legalized inhumanity.
A work based mostly on characters’ spoken recollections rather than action risks inertia, but the production largely overcomes this problem with fast intercutting of character appearances and effective dramatic enactments of their words.
Still, the sameness of the stories makes the production drag at times. Each character relates a tale of false arrest, a grossly unfair trial, horrible imprisonment, agonizingly complicated release and a struggle to re-emerge in society.
Providing another strong emotional pole for the Jack in the Black Box Theatre performance, Tyrone P. Holt gives the role of Delbert Tibbs an energetic combination of rap cool and bookish eloquence. The black poet and philosopher serves as a sort of Greek chorus, defining themes and ennobling his own experience of condemnation and redemption with wonderfully street-smart yet transcendent language.
As Robert Earl Hayes, a black man freed with the aid of his own legal maneuvers, Dwayne Jackson oscillates between gentleness, rage and sorrow. Allen Hagler as Kerry Max Cook, James Sutton as Gary Gauger and Kevin Harry as David Keaton define well-etched personalties whose stories go far beyond case studies.
Douglas Curlin and Craig Glassco portray a series of cracker lawmen and incompetent lawyers, reinforcing well-worn, not-so-good-ol’-boy Southern stereotypes.
With much more complexity, Curlin delivers one of the production’s highlights, portraying Jacobs’ husband, also on death row but in a separate prison miles away. Reading a love letter to her, he conveys their enduring love and sexual passion, despite the distance between them. A humorous, tender moment arises when Sunny tells how she and Jesse wrote their intimate language in Japanese to evade the prison censors.
Such well-staged sequences allow a production that risks turning preachy and dogmatic to mostly succeed as theater.
“The Exonerated.” 8 p.m. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and March 27-29. 2:30 p.m. Sundays. $15.00. Horizon Theatre, 1083 Austin Ave., Atlanta. www.jackintheblackbox.org.
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