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                                                                                             Call it "Life After Death Row" if you want to be dramatic --- but what could be more dramatic than a play about people who were on Death Row for crimes they did not commit and were finally freed after years of living in an all-too-real kind of nightmare Twilight Zone? The answer is that the thing that could be more dramatic and tragic is that the six falsely accused and sentenced people we meet in The Exonerated are real people, their stories told in their own words and culled from public documents, based on the dedicated research and transcribed interviews conducted by the playwrights.  And these harrowing and haunting tales are just a small part of what was found in the process inspired by a debate about the death penalty attended by writers Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen. 

The play, which is published and has seen prior productions in New York, California and around the country, makes one want to alternately cry in sympathy and scream with rage.  The title's indication that the people were eventually cleared allows for some much-needed hope and piques the curiosity to wonder how and how well anyone can move on after such treatment.  As one character says, he may not have received the death penalty but has died thousands of times.  Memories and fears are not so easy to kill as mere mortals.  For another, carrying on means being a living example of some kind of resilience and recovery and what should never happen again--- but does. 
 
Having interviewed and researched many cases and choosing to concentrate on a smaller, representative sample so that audiences can really feel they "know" the characters is no easy task.  Although the original drafts brought forth ten separate stories and the current script brings us just six portraits to share company with in an 80-minute play, the sense of sketchiness remains.  Oh, sure, we feel the pain and the disillusionment and the bewilderment and the desperation, but do any of them emerge as fully-rounded people beyond what we learn about their chapters of horror (with necessarily time-consuming specifics of how they were questioned, misled, and treated as pawns in a perverse truth/justice-optional justice system)?  A lot of the script is the unreeling of jaw-dropping blow-by-blow accounts of the many steps in the mistreatments and miscarriages of justice with similarities among the stories, with their commonality of incompetence and the element of racial or other kinds of prejudice and hatred a strong factor.  Since much of the text involves recollections of long-ago incidents, through the prism and perspective of time having passed and the survivor's skills of creating distance and scar tissue, some feels oddly dispassionate, with shock or outrage or fear or hope eroded by the wearying burdens of the years.  Fresh wounds are different things.   
 
Director Vince De George brings both theatricality and humanity to the proceedings, keeping the full cast onstage and lit to be an ever-present empathetic, sad-eyed, knowing group of witness-bearers and implicit support network.  Their physical proximity, actually seated in chairs in a circle at first, in fact, recalls a structured "support group" meeting as their introductions overlap.  Just as some of the stories and characters are more compelling than others, some of the acting is more engaging --- and more convincing.  Some feels more effortful and less liquid.  Still, our hearts break for the character of Robert, struggling to wrap his mind around an insane world that beats him down time and again, as his world is shattered, in Lufthansey Josa's quietly heroic portrayal.  Jane Buchanan injects some fresh energy into the dour proceedings with a certain resilience and the maturity of hindsight, still puzzled that she could be thought of as someone who'd take a human life when she is, after all, a vegetarian who won't even endorse animals being slaughtered.  Daryl Glenn brings an eloquently pained dignity to a man who carries the weight and consequences of victimization that never really gets a vacation.  Four of the actors play multiple roles, allowing for characters and interaction that give some respite from the recounting of the cases and their aftermath. 
 
And, though truth may be stranger than fiction, it has its own limitations for theatricality in a play's desire to be true to the words of its tragic figures and their circumstances. The play's structure of constantly jumping from one saga to the another after a few minutes has the effect of attention-deficit disorder as audiences' attention isshare certain bounced constantly as if subject to the whims of someone switching hyperactively with a giant TV remote control device, picking up on scenes from half a dozen shows being broadcast at the same time with similar plots and tones.  Back and forth and back again we go; just as one is getting the sense and senselessness of one case and being pulled into one individual's personality and mindset, we are yanked to another story.  With all the details and common threads unravelled, it can be less effective, the whole less than the sum of the split-up parts.  The advantage of this structure is to emphasize early on that such experiences and feelings are, alarmingly, not so rare and that the six people of different ages, backgrounds and circumstances share certain reactions.  At times, though, that presents diminishing impact as it becomes a "here we go again" ride into a frightening abyss where all is amiss.  Intense it is, but intensely interesting and involving?  --- not always, for this viewer.  Like Broadway's recent The Scottsboro Boys, which also took on true-life false accusation/imprisonment in a Southern setting informed by disgusting racial mistreatment, there is a power punch to the stomach and a human face put on the case.   It seemed awfully odd in the lobby after the show to hear someone connected to the production ask a friend who'd attended, "Did you enjoy the show?"  I'm not sure one can "enjoy" such a parade of human pain, but one can hardly escape without being unsettled, saddened and moved.  And if the death penalty can find any advocates after someone gets these faces put to statistics, one would be amazed one more time at the capacity of people to be heartless and living in a false reality ---- like the people in The Exonerated also feel they are in.