BU Today feature: CFA Presents Searing Drama of Wrongfully Convicted Inmates
This article was originally published on October 18, 2019. Video by Carlos Soler | Text by BU Today staff | Photos by Jackie Ricciardi
The searing 2002 drama The Exonerated is the story of six real-life men and women who were wrongfully sentenced to Death Row for crimes they did not commit. The play kicks off the College of Fine Arts School of Theatre 2019-2020 season
Based on interviews, letters, and court documents, the play was written by Jesscia Blank and Erik Jensen and was first presented in 2002 off Broadway, where it ran for over 600 performances. It moves between first-person monologues and scenes set in courtrooms and prisons. In his New York Times review, Ben Brantley described the play as “an artfully edited anthology of interviews on its own terms, thoroughly involving theater, while reminding you that real life has a way of coming up with resonant metaphors, grotesque ironies, and cruel coincidences that no dramatist would dare invent.”
The Exonerated went on to win a Drama Desk Award, a Lucille Lortel Award, and an Outer Critics Circle Award before being adapted into a film starring Oscar winner Susan Sarandon, Danny Glover, and Brian Dennehy.
Blank and Jensen crisscrossed the country, interviewing 40 death row inmates who had been freed after DNA and other evidence proved their innocence. These six former inmates recount their interrogations and subsequent arrests and trials in spare, often heartbreaking detail and reflect on their often painful return to civilian life following their exoneration.