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255 State Killing, the Stage of Innocence, and The Exonerated Katy ryan Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen’s documentary playThe Exonerated brings to the stage the experiences of six peoplewho spent between two and twentytwo years on death row for crimes they did not commit. Drawn from interviews and developed with Allan Buchman, director of the Culture Project, The Exonerated was first performed by the Actor’s Gang in Los Angeles on April 19, 2002. The play moved to Off-Broadway six months later, directed by Bob Balaban, and has been performed across the country, in Europe, and at the United Nations. Often staged as readers’ theater with a minimal set and high-profile actors, The Exonerated has won numerous awards, including the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Off-Broadway Play. It appeared on lists of the top ten plays for 2002 in the New York Times and Time magazine and was made into a movie by Court TV in 2005. Writing for the Telegraph , Charles Spencer “approached The Exonerated with a certain degree of dread”—“There are few spectacles more ridiculous than Hollywood stars in one of their periodic fits of morality”—but he found the play moving and important. Ben Brantley in the New York Times called it “intense and deeply affecting.”1 Through a popular merger of first-hand testimony, star power, and sentimental address,The Exonerated elicits sympathy for former death row prisoners .The hallmark signs of sentimentalityare abundant: human connectedness , shared pain, broken ties, compassion in brutalized contexts, and redemptive suffering. Brantley writes that the clear goal of The Exonerated is “to edify.” By focusing on innocence, Blank and Jensen hoped to “sidestep much of the polarized ethical debate that so often bogs down conversations about the death penalty and get right to the human issues involved.”2 Balaban describes the work as less polemical than pedagogical.3 As a celebrated example of political theater, The Exonerated also provides a critical forum for conversations about state killing. The script may not sidestep a debate as much as inscribe key cultural dynamics. In part, The Exonerated promotes reform by substituting universal vulnerability for a more accurate assessment of imprisonment and judicial murder. Although 256 katy ryan hardly uncontroversial, the play does generate a deceptive sense of shared agreement—afterall, few people argue that innocent people should be poisoned or electrocuted. (William Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia have come close.)4 In its steady tone and narrow focus, the play cedes to sentimentalism ’s “genericwish foran unconflicted world, onewhere structural inequities , not emotions and intimacies, are epiphenomenal.”5 Beneath the play’s sentimental structure lie the murderous realities of the justice system. A few years ago at an orientation session for teachers at a federal prison in West Virginia, I was given a handout of things not to do with inmates. Top on the list of don’ts was this requirement: “Don’t overidentify.” We were warned about the cunning of prisoners, their capacity to play on visitors ’ sympathy.We were given detailed instructions on what to do in a hostage situation. The warden made clear that in the case of an attempted escape , he is trained to kill—and it doesn’t matter if he’s aiming at a man ora woman, or if thewoman is a mother, as most women in prison are.To sympathizewith people held captive under such conditions is a needed, ethical response, and The Exonerated moves in this direction. I realize my analysis may seem wearily skeptical (What are the bad consequences of this good literary work?), but the need to reflect on what we talk about when we talk about the U.S. prison system is especially urgent. Starting the Conversation Blank and Jensen interviewed on the phone forty people who had been wrongfully convicted of capital crimes and selected twenty to meet in person . For the play, they whittled the twenty down to twelve, and the twelve down to the following six cases. In the early 1970s, Delbert Tibbs was convicted of the murderof a white man and the rape of a sixteen-year-old white woman in Florida. The evidence against him consisted of the eyewitness account of the rape victim. “Now, initially,” Tibbs explains, “the girl who survived the thing described the murderer as a black man about five six, very dark complexion, with pockmarked skin and a bush Afro. [Beat.] Now that don’t fit me no matter how you draw it—except racially. . . .We’re...

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