The Exonerated attempts to answer this question through the. Especially when one considers that these characters are real people and the script is pulled from. The Exonerated, a play by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, was first performed in Los Angeles by the Actors' Gang, on April 19, 2002, directed by the playwrights. The play premiered in New York City on October 10, 2002, at 45 Bleecker Theater, directed by Bob Balaban. It was first published in 2004. The Exonerated Play Script The Exonerated Play Characters The show is carefully and dramatically constructed, and therefore fit the movements and intonations of the veteran professional performers with ease. For Gauger, Jacobs and Tibbs, reciting lines about their own lives took warm-up time. Thought-provoking, emotional, and unflinching in its honesty, 'The Exonerated' is an incredible script, entwining six Americans' stories and sharing them in a simple, fluid format. Largely composed of monologues taken from interview transcripts and interspersed with scenes from years past, the play is a reflection - for the characters, the.
The Exonerated by Jessica Blank
Among them are Sunny Jacobs, a mother of two whose unwavering belief during sixteen years in jail that she would be released (despite the execution of her husband, who was also innocent, for the same crime) allowed her to dedicate herself to being a living memorial when she was freed. There is Kerry Max Cook, a Texan who was convicted of murdering a young woman even though she was found with another mans hair grasped in her fist--a man whom Texas killed a thousand times, and just keeps on doing it in his nightmares. And there is Delbert Tibbs, a black Chicago poet who speaks of his years on death row with anger and bitterness, yet also, as he says, still sings. All their stories have been compiled and edited by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen into The Exonerated, a play that is both a riveting work of theater and an exploration of the dark side of the American criminal justice system.
Anthony Ray Hinton: 'The Sun Does Shine' - Talks at Google
Men Women Total Cast. View Cart.
Jessica Blank
Theatre Journal By Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen. Incorporating six of those interviews with court testimony, police interrogation, and personal correspondence, Blank and Jensen have crafted a powerful indictment against the criminal justice system and capital punishment. The narrative spans the arrest, imprisonment and eventual exoneration and release of five men and one woman—three of whom are African American and three Caucasian. The cases include coercion of suspects to make misleading statements, representation by attorneys who were not disinterested parties, and inconclusive fingerprint evidence. Prison life is presented as treacherous: when one prisoner was assaulted by his fellow inmates, they carved the words 'good pussy' on his buttocks.
What effect does it have on a person--a soul, a life--to have freedom and self-respect stripped away and then, ostensibly, returned years later after decades of incarceration? The Exonerated attempts to answer this question through the words of six innocent men and women who, after years in jail, emerged from death row to try to reclaim what was left of their lives. Among them are Sunny Jacobs, a mother of two whose unwavering belief during sixteen years in jail that she would be released despite the execution of her husband, who was also innocent, for the same crime allowed her to dedicate herself to being a 'living memorial' when she was freed. There is Kerry Max Cook, a Texan who was convicted of murdering a young woman even though she was found with another man's hair grasped in her fist--a man whom 'Texas killed a thousand times, and just keeps on doing it' in his nightmares. And there is Delbert Tibbs, a black Chicago poet who speaks of his years on death row with anger and bitterness, yet also, as he says, 'still sings.
It was adapted into a film by the same name. Their accounts of the freed convicts emphasize their lives after being sentenced to death, including much of the legal proceedings that gained their exoneration. During the summer of , Jensen and Blank traveled to interview 40 former death row inmates who had been freed by the state after having served as much as 22 years in prison. A group of exonerated individuals also attended. Ryan was reviewing how to handle death row inmates in light of the publicity surrounding those who had been convicted during Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge 's tenure, which ended when he was fired in Ryan declared a moratorium on the use of the death sentence in the state in In early January , shortly before he left office, he pardoned four men whom he believed to be innocent.
The Exonerated Script - Free download as PDF File .pdf) or view tad Canale fr THE EXONERATED are ull exdunvely by DRAMATISTS PLAY SERVICE, INC.
to kill a mockingbird q&a
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Culled from interviews, letters, transcripts, case files, and the public record, The Exonerated tells the true stories of six people sent to Death Row for crimes they did not commit. Their time in prison ranged from 2 years to 22 years. Actors sit on stools arrayed at the lip of the stage, with scripts on music stands in front of them. There are no sets and costumes to speak of, and only lighting is used to punctuate the transitions between speakers. The evening's ultimate message is blunt, too: The death penalty, as it is administered by a flawed American justice system, is a moral monstrosity. It is by no means a dry jeremiad. Drawn from a series of interviews with men and women who spent time on death row before being cleared of the crimes for which they were sentenced, it is necessarily disturbing and even grueling.
Read Free For 30 Days. The Exonerated Script. Description: Script to the Exonerated. Flag for inappropriate content. Related titles.
Successful watercolour painting by rowland hilderfreeStanford Report, February 8, 2006
By Barbara Palmer
Ray MickshawThe Los Angeles theater ensemble the Actors’ Gang will perform The Exonerated on campus Feb. 10-11 at Dinkelspiel Auditorium. The play tells the stories of six exonerated death row inmates.
Ray MickshawBrian Powell plays the role of Gary Gauger in a previous production of The Exonerated. Gauger is one of six people whose stories are dramatized in the play.
The idea for the script that would become the award-winning play The Exonerated, which will be performed on campus Feb. 10-11, was sketched out in a series of notes that two young actors, Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, passed to each another as they sat in the audience at a conference on the death penalty held at Columbia University in 2000.
The conference presented information about death row inmates in Illinois whose confessions had been obtained under torture, which was 'very disturbing from an intellectual point of view,' Blank said. But it wasn't until she and Jensen heard the voice of an inmate, who was calling into the conference from prison, that they became emotionally engaged, Blank recalled. The telephone call lasted only a couple of minutes, but 'we were crying,' she said. 'Everyone in the room was crying.'
Jensen whispered to Blank that the conference was 'fine and good, but the collective group already knew these stories,' Jensen recalled. 'It was preaching to the choir.' So, he wondered, how do you get around the problem of bringing immediacy and emotion to the experiences of the wrongly convicted to audiences who otherwise wouldn't hear it?
Their solution was to bring to the stage the words and the stories of those who had been wrongly sentenced to die. Using contacts provided by organizations including the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law, Blank and Jensen traveled across the country and interviewed dozens of former inmates who had been found innocent and freed by the state after being wrongly convicted and sentenced to death.
Even as they shaped the material they gathered into a script that would become an early version of The Exonerated, 'we literally thought we would be doing it for a few nights in a 90-seat [off-Broadway] theater for some of our friends,' Blank said.
Instead, the play, which tells the true stories of six exonerated death row inmates, was embraced by a long list of celebrities and has been performed hundreds of times across the country. The play helped start a national conversation about the U.S. criminal justice system, 'one that was really ready to happen,' Blank said.
The conversation will continue this week at Stanford during a weeklong residency of the Los Angeles-based Actors' Gang, which will perform The Exonerated on Friday and Saturday nights. The residency of the theater company—which is under the artistic direction of Tim Robbins, an early supporter of the play—is serving as a fulcrum for a series of workshops and discussions organized by Stanford Lively Arts to explore the role of the arts in social justice. The Actors' Gang residency is part of a new Lively Arts residency program designed to more deeply integrate the arts into campus life and curricula.
Jensen and Actors' Gang members will participate in student workshops about writing documentary plays, the arts and activism, and creating political theater. Public forums scheduled during the residency will bring together artists, scholars and activists to discuss political, ethical, sociological and scientific aspects of wrongful convictions.
'What's consistent throughout will be an examination of the role that the arts play in shaping the issues,' said Michelle Lee, campus residency program manager for Lively Arts. Lee, a playwright who received a Master of Fine Arts degree in drama from Yale University, joined the Lively Arts staff in January.
'Historically, there have been many ways in which the theater has addressed politics,' Lee said. But The Exonerated is 'the best example that I personally have ever encountered of the intersection of the arts and social justice.'
The play's most obvious impact came after a special performance held in December 2002 for then-Illinois Gov. George Ryan, said law Professor Lawrence Marshall, who founded Northwestern's Center on Wrongful Convictions. Marshall joined the Stanford Law School faculty last year. 'The evening was very, very pivotal' in a campaign to call attention to wrongful convictions, he said. Three hundred people in the audience were watching the governor, who was clearly moved, watch the play, he added. The following month, Ryan—citing 'the demon of error' in the capital justice system—commuted the sentences of 171 people who were then on death row in Illinois.
'There is something about hearing the stories in the manner that The Exonerated tells them that humanizes the issue and compels one to recognize there are many sides to capital punishment, including the victims of crime and victims of a system that makes errors,' Marshall said.
The Exonerated Script Pdf
There is one key point that Marshall hopes won't be lost on the play's audiences, he said. 'As awful as what these six people endured, these people are the lucky ones. These are the ones for whom the evidence of innocence emerged in time.' For every such fortunate one, 'there are several others who are not so fortunate, who linger in prison or who are executed,' he added.
However, the play also has drawn some skeptical reactions. In a Jan. 26 New York Times op-ed, Joshua Marquis, vice president of the National District Attorneys Association, writes: 'Two of the play's six characters (Sonia Jacobs and Kerry Cook) were not exonerated, but were let out of prison after a combined 36 years behind bars when they agreed to plea bargains. A third (Robert Hayes) was unavailable to do publicity tours because he is in prison, having pleaded guilty to another homicide almost identical to the one of which he was acquitted.'
The Exonerated Play
The Exonerated by Jessica Blank
Among them are Sunny Jacobs, a mother of two whose unwavering belief during sixteen years in jail that she would be released (despite the execution of her husband, who was also innocent, for the same crime) allowed her to dedicate herself to being a living memorial when she was freed. There is Kerry Max Cook, a Texan who was convicted of murdering a young woman even though she was found with another mans hair grasped in her fist--a man whom Texas killed a thousand times, and just keeps on doing it in his nightmares. And there is Delbert Tibbs, a black Chicago poet who speaks of his years on death row with anger and bitterness, yet also, as he says, still sings. All their stories have been compiled and edited by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen into The Exonerated, a play that is both a riveting work of theater and an exploration of the dark side of the American criminal justice system.
Anthony Ray Hinton: 'The Sun Does Shine' - Talks at Google
Men Women Total Cast. View Cart.
Jessica Blank
Theatre Journal By Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen. Incorporating six of those interviews with court testimony, police interrogation, and personal correspondence, Blank and Jensen have crafted a powerful indictment against the criminal justice system and capital punishment. The narrative spans the arrest, imprisonment and eventual exoneration and release of five men and one woman—three of whom are African American and three Caucasian. The cases include coercion of suspects to make misleading statements, representation by attorneys who were not disinterested parties, and inconclusive fingerprint evidence. Prison life is presented as treacherous: when one prisoner was assaulted by his fellow inmates, they carved the words 'good pussy' on his buttocks.
What effect does it have on a person--a soul, a life--to have freedom and self-respect stripped away and then, ostensibly, returned years later after decades of incarceration? The Exonerated attempts to answer this question through the words of six innocent men and women who, after years in jail, emerged from death row to try to reclaim what was left of their lives. Among them are Sunny Jacobs, a mother of two whose unwavering belief during sixteen years in jail that she would be released despite the execution of her husband, who was also innocent, for the same crime allowed her to dedicate herself to being a 'living memorial' when she was freed. There is Kerry Max Cook, a Texan who was convicted of murdering a young woman even though she was found with another man's hair grasped in her fist--a man whom 'Texas killed a thousand times, and just keeps on doing it' in his nightmares. And there is Delbert Tibbs, a black Chicago poet who speaks of his years on death row with anger and bitterness, yet also, as he says, 'still sings.
It was adapted into a film by the same name. Their accounts of the freed convicts emphasize their lives after being sentenced to death, including much of the legal proceedings that gained their exoneration. During the summer of , Jensen and Blank traveled to interview 40 former death row inmates who had been freed by the state after having served as much as 22 years in prison. A group of exonerated individuals also attended. Ryan was reviewing how to handle death row inmates in light of the publicity surrounding those who had been convicted during Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge 's tenure, which ended when he was fired in Ryan declared a moratorium on the use of the death sentence in the state in In early January , shortly before he left office, he pardoned four men whom he believed to be innocent.
The Exonerated Script - Free download as PDF File .pdf) or view tad Canale fr THE EXONERATED are ull exdunvely by DRAMATISTS PLAY SERVICE, INC.
to kill a mockingbird q&a
Customers who viewed this item also viewed
Culled from interviews, letters, transcripts, case files, and the public record, The Exonerated tells the true stories of six people sent to Death Row for crimes they did not commit. Their time in prison ranged from 2 years to 22 years. Actors sit on stools arrayed at the lip of the stage, with scripts on music stands in front of them. There are no sets and costumes to speak of, and only lighting is used to punctuate the transitions between speakers. The evening's ultimate message is blunt, too: The death penalty, as it is administered by a flawed American justice system, is a moral monstrosity. It is by no means a dry jeremiad. Drawn from a series of interviews with men and women who spent time on death row before being cleared of the crimes for which they were sentenced, it is necessarily disturbing and even grueling.
Read Free For 30 Days. The Exonerated Script. Description: Script to the Exonerated. Flag for inappropriate content. Related titles.
Successful watercolour painting by rowland hilderfreeStanford Report, February 8, 2006
By Barbara Palmer
Ray MickshawThe Los Angeles theater ensemble the Actors’ Gang will perform The Exonerated on campus Feb. 10-11 at Dinkelspiel Auditorium. The play tells the stories of six exonerated death row inmates.
Ray MickshawBrian Powell plays the role of Gary Gauger in a previous production of The Exonerated. Gauger is one of six people whose stories are dramatized in the play.
The idea for the script that would become the award-winning play The Exonerated, which will be performed on campus Feb. 10-11, was sketched out in a series of notes that two young actors, Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, passed to each another as they sat in the audience at a conference on the death penalty held at Columbia University in 2000.
The conference presented information about death row inmates in Illinois whose confessions had been obtained under torture, which was 'very disturbing from an intellectual point of view,' Blank said. But it wasn't until she and Jensen heard the voice of an inmate, who was calling into the conference from prison, that they became emotionally engaged, Blank recalled. The telephone call lasted only a couple of minutes, but 'we were crying,' she said. 'Everyone in the room was crying.'
Jensen whispered to Blank that the conference was 'fine and good, but the collective group already knew these stories,' Jensen recalled. 'It was preaching to the choir.' So, he wondered, how do you get around the problem of bringing immediacy and emotion to the experiences of the wrongly convicted to audiences who otherwise wouldn't hear it?
Their solution was to bring to the stage the words and the stories of those who had been wrongly sentenced to die. Using contacts provided by organizations including the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law, Blank and Jensen traveled across the country and interviewed dozens of former inmates who had been found innocent and freed by the state after being wrongly convicted and sentenced to death.
Even as they shaped the material they gathered into a script that would become an early version of The Exonerated, 'we literally thought we would be doing it for a few nights in a 90-seat [off-Broadway] theater for some of our friends,' Blank said.
Instead, the play, which tells the true stories of six exonerated death row inmates, was embraced by a long list of celebrities and has been performed hundreds of times across the country. The play helped start a national conversation about the U.S. criminal justice system, 'one that was really ready to happen,' Blank said.
The conversation will continue this week at Stanford during a weeklong residency of the Los Angeles-based Actors' Gang, which will perform The Exonerated on Friday and Saturday nights. The residency of the theater company—which is under the artistic direction of Tim Robbins, an early supporter of the play—is serving as a fulcrum for a series of workshops and discussions organized by Stanford Lively Arts to explore the role of the arts in social justice. The Actors' Gang residency is part of a new Lively Arts residency program designed to more deeply integrate the arts into campus life and curricula.
Jensen and Actors' Gang members will participate in student workshops about writing documentary plays, the arts and activism, and creating political theater. Public forums scheduled during the residency will bring together artists, scholars and activists to discuss political, ethical, sociological and scientific aspects of wrongful convictions.
'What's consistent throughout will be an examination of the role that the arts play in shaping the issues,' said Michelle Lee, campus residency program manager for Lively Arts. Lee, a playwright who received a Master of Fine Arts degree in drama from Yale University, joined the Lively Arts staff in January.
'Historically, there have been many ways in which the theater has addressed politics,' Lee said. But The Exonerated is 'the best example that I personally have ever encountered of the intersection of the arts and social justice.'
The play's most obvious impact came after a special performance held in December 2002 for then-Illinois Gov. George Ryan, said law Professor Lawrence Marshall, who founded Northwestern's Center on Wrongful Convictions. Marshall joined the Stanford Law School faculty last year. 'The evening was very, very pivotal' in a campaign to call attention to wrongful convictions, he said. Three hundred people in the audience were watching the governor, who was clearly moved, watch the play, he added. The following month, Ryan—citing 'the demon of error' in the capital justice system—commuted the sentences of 171 people who were then on death row in Illinois.
'There is something about hearing the stories in the manner that The Exonerated tells them that humanizes the issue and compels one to recognize there are many sides to capital punishment, including the victims of crime and victims of a system that makes errors,' Marshall said.
The Exonerated Script Pdf
There is one key point that Marshall hopes won't be lost on the play's audiences, he said. 'As awful as what these six people endured, these people are the lucky ones. These are the ones for whom the evidence of innocence emerged in time.' For every such fortunate one, 'there are several others who are not so fortunate, who linger in prison or who are executed,' he added.
However, the play also has drawn some skeptical reactions. In a Jan. 26 New York Times op-ed, Joshua Marquis, vice president of the National District Attorneys Association, writes: 'Two of the play's six characters (Sonia Jacobs and Kerry Cook) were not exonerated, but were let out of prison after a combined 36 years behind bars when they agreed to plea bargains. A third (Robert Hayes) was unavailable to do publicity tours because he is in prison, having pleaded guilty to another homicide almost identical to the one of which he was acquitted.'
The Exonerated Play
The Exonerated will be performed at 8 p.m. Feb. 10-11 in Dinkelspiel Auditorium. A discussion moderated by Marshall and death row exoneree Gary Gauger, whose story is among those told in the play, will follow the performance.
Other public events will include:
The Exonerated Film
Feb. 8: Truth and Justice: An Exploration of the Death Penalty. At 12:30 p.m. in Room 290 of the Law School. Debra Satz, associate professor of philosophy and the director of the Program in Ethics and Society, will moderate a panel discussion with Jensen; Marshall; lawyer William Abrams, a lecturer in the Program in Human Biology who is working to overturn convictions of two Alabama death row inmates; Craig Haney, a professor of psychology at the University of California-Santa Cruz; and Lance Lindsey, the executive director of Death Penalty Focus in San Francisco.
The Exonerated 5 Case
Feb. 8: Surviving Justice. At 8 p.m. in Cubberley Auditorium. Dave Eggers and Lola Vollen, co-editors of Surviving Justice: America's Wrongly Convicted and Exonerated, will appear with exonerees Gauger and James Newsome.
Ticket information for The Exonerated and additional information about public events can by found on the Stanford Lively Arts website at http://livelyarts.stanford.edu. Tickets at $38/$34 for adults and $19/$17 for Stanford students are available at the Stanford Ticket Office or by calling 725-2787.
