Feb 19, 2010

Life After Death Row

A HUGE thanks to Adriana, for this article.


Sunday, April 7, 2002

THEATER
Life After Death Row
Two actors traveled the country to meet people wrongly convicted. The result: a drama and a new perspective.

By HUGH HART


Two summers ago Jessica Blank and her boyfriend, Erik Jensen, embarked on a road trip from New York to Minneapolis. It was no vacation. They were visiting survivors of death row.
"We'd drive to one person's house, do an interview for two or three hours, get back on the road, drive 12 hours into the next state to get there just in time for the next interview. One of us would sleep and one of us would drive," recalls Blank, sitting in front of the empty stage at the Actors' Gang theater.

Beside her is the congenially rumpled Jensen, who picks up the tale: "And the whole time we've got the cell phone in the car with this weird Radio Shack recharger, and I'm charging the phone and Jessica's typing on the laptop transcribing stuff while we're driving in the car."
In the course of that frenetic journey and six other trips through Texas and other Southern states, New York actors Blank and Jensen interviewed 20 people who'd been released from prison after being wrongly convicted of murder. "The Exonerated," a documentary drama opening for previews April 13 at the Actors Gang, weaves together six of those stories.

Stories like Gary Gauger's. His mother and father were found stabbed to death on Gauger's Wisconsin farm. After being questioned for 14 hours, the disoriented hippie farmer gave a "vision statement"--a what-if scenario in which Gauger described how he would have killed his parents, if he had killed them. That statement was described in court as a confession. Gauger was sentenced to death and spent seven years in prison before two motorcycle gang members confessed to the killing.

Then there's Kerry Cook. In 1977, he was a frightened 22-year-old bartender who made the mistake of lying when homicide investigators asked if he'd ever been in a murdered woman's apartment. Cook's fingerprints were found on the door frame. He was convicted of murder and spent 20 years in a 6-foot-by-14-foot Texas prison cell before DNA tests proved the victim's ex-boyfriend was the culprit.

Or Sunny Jacobs. She and her husband, ex-convict Jesse Tafero, were sentenced in 1976 for murdering two policemen at a Florida rest stop. Tafero was executed before an associate, Walter Rhodes, admitted his guilt. By then, Jacobs had spent 16 years in prison.
Jensen says, "I think our initial idea was that these stories would be very dramatic, like 'Hamlet' dramatic, and very serious"-- "and maybe just very, very sad," adds Blank. "But when the interviews started happening," Jensen continues, "it was weird because they were also filled with incredible hope and gratitude. Like with Sunny, the one time she teared up in our interview was when she talked about this juror who had gotten in touch with her when it was all over and said he was sorry. She just had this incredible forgiveness."

Blank is reminded of their visit with Gauger. "We went to talk to Gary on his amazing organic farm where he gave us garlic..." "... that's still growing on our fire escape in New York," adds Jensen.
"And here's a guy, when they found the people who really did kill his parents," Blank continues, "Gary requested that those guys not be given the death penalty. You hear things like that, it's pretty astounding."

Listening to the survivors' tales first hand shook the couple considerably, Jensen says. "I've been in New York for the last 10 years, and I take pride in what I can handle. But hearing these stories blew us away and the people themselves blew us away. I'd never seen anyone so courageous as the people we met that summer.

"Doing those interviews put our lives into an incredible perspective. Somebody cutting me off in traffic, that is not a big deal anymore."

Blank interjects, "Who cares!"

Jensen: "Or like personal things between Jess and me, we can work it out, because there is nothing in our lives that can compare to being on death row when you shouldn't be."
Growing up in Minnesota, where his grandfather worked as a highway patrolman, Jensen remembers being the only student in his Apple Valley High School history class willing to argue against capital punishment.

Blank says she's been interested in prison reform practically all her life. Her parents were Washington, D.C.-based antiwar activists in the '60s. She double-majored in theater and philosophy at the University of Minnesota, gravitating early in her acting career to documentary theater as embodied by performance artist Anna Deavere Smith.
Jensen, who earned a bachelor's in fine arts from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, cites as an inspiration his friend Moises Kaufman, who conceived and directed "The Laramie Project." Recently televised in a version on HBO, the piece used interview material to reconstruct the aftermath of Matthew Shepard's murder.

By the time they began dating in early 2000, Blank and Jensen were paying the rent with film, TV and stage gigs while tapping into Manhattan political circles through benefits and spoken-word performances. But they hankered for a more ambitious project that would meld activist impulses with compelling storytelling. A few weeks after they met in a New York restaurant, Blank and Jensen got the push they needed in the form of a heart-rending phone call.

Jensen recalls, "Jessica dragged me to this anti-death penalty conference at Columbia University. It was gonna take six hours, it was a pain ... but I went." They sat through typical talking-head forums, then gathered around a speaker phone. "It was this inmate in Chicago," Blank says. "His confession was basically tortured out of him. There was something in him that was just pleading for somebody to hear his story."

Blank and Jensen decided it was time to act.

Raising $12,000 in dribs and drabs to finance their expeditions, Blank and Jensen hit the road with a tape recorder, video camera and a list of contacts provided by the Center for Wrongful Convictions and other groups. In Chicago, they visited Delbert Tibbs, who spent three years in prison after he was convicted for murder in Florida. Tibbs, a former seminary student, was a foot taller than the real killer. But, like the actual culprit, Tibbs was an African American, and that was sufficient for a witness to point to him as the guilty party.

When he was first contacted by a mutual friend, Tibbs recalls, "I wondered, 'What is this, somebody working on their master's thesis?' And they tell me, 'Well no, they're artists and want to use their art to do something about the death penalty. And I said, 'Do they have any money?' because I wasn't working at the time.

"'No, they don't have any money.' And to myself I say, 'Well, maybe this is something good. Just for the sake of the cause--well, yeah, I'll talk to 'em.'"

When the two showed up at his door, recalls Tibbs, "they told me when they get back to New York, they'll be looking for an angel and put it on, and I'm thinking, 'Well ... everybody's looking for an angel in New York to put on a play.' But anyway, I did an interview with them, and I just sort of let it all hang out. They recorded it. And then they called me three or four months later and said, 'We'd like you to come to New York. We're gonna pay your fare.'

"They had pretty much put what I had told them right back in the play. When it was over, the people just kept applauding, it seemed like for 10 minutes. They took, like, three curtain calls." Afterward, Tibbs met actor Charles Dutton, who portrayed him. "He and I had some bubbly wine and hors d'oeuvres and all of that afterwards. I thought it was a fine thing."

In September 2000, Blank and Jensen returned from their travels with 150 pages of unedited manuscript. They didn't find an angel but did hook up with a priceless connection in the person of Bob Balaban. An astute New York actor-director-writer-producer, Balaban hired character actor and first-time writer Julian Fellowes to create his Oscar-winning screenplay for "Gosford Park."

Balaban had befriended Jensen after directing him in Arthur Kopit's play "Y2K" at the Manhattan Theatre Club in 2000. "My main contribution was access," says Balaban. "I knew celebrities who were very interested in the subject, so when Erik and Jessica called me with the piece, the first thing I said was, 'Susan and Tim are friends of mine. I'm going to ask them if they'd like to do a benefit.'"

That would be Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins. When the two actors signed up for a staged reading at the Culture Project at the 45 Bleecker Theater in November 2000, "The Exonerated" gathered momentum. Richard Dreyfuss, Parker Posey, Blair Brown, Steve Buscemi, David Morse, Cherry Jones, Martha Plimpton, Debra Winger, Ossie Davis and Dutton participated in four benefit performances, including one at the United Nations.

The play's dramatic potential was obvious to Robbins. "I think the thing that makes for interesting acting and interesting plays is high stakes. I don't think it gets much higher than what you find in 'The Exonerated.'"

After the readings, Balaban urged Blank and Jensen to undertake another round of research. "I wanted to give 'The Exonerated' a reason to be an evening in the theater and not just a benefit," says Balaban, who will direct the expanded version of "The Exonerated" when it moves to New York for an off-Broadway production. "I suggested that Erik and Jessica add court transcripts so that you feel some structure to the piece. And structure, whether it's TV or plays or movies, is really everything--what to begin with, what you choose to put back to back."

The couple made more trips, read thousands of pages of trial records, examined microfiche newspaper articles, sorted through affidavits, read depositions and looked up police interrogations to add dramatic counterpoint to their protagonists' monologues.

Compressing all that raw material into a 90-minute performance required months of rewrites. Says Jensen, "It was like writing a play the way Moby writes music: We were mixing words. Depending on how you juxtaposed things together, different things, completely different meanings, would pop. That's what really created the power of the piece."

While Jensen was in North Carolina shooting the medieval comedy "Black Knight" --he played a warrior sentenced to be executed--Balaban and Blank labored on in New York. Last winter, Robbins offered to stage "The Exonerated" at the Actors' Gang where he serves as artistic director.

One could easily imagine that Blank and Jensen, conversant as they are with crime statistics, pending legislation and case studies of prosecutorial misconduct, would be more than happy to get on a soapbox.

But Blank and Jensen, who got married last summer, deliberately kept their personal views out of "The Exonerated." Says Jensen, "The last thing we want to do is some kind of revolutionary beret-wearing, fist-in-the-air kind of theater. That turns more people off than it draws in, and we're not doing that with this play. We just want to present these stories as cleanly and clearly as we can."
"I see our roles as being a conduit," Jensen says. "People think actors are kind of self-involved, and it's kind of nice to do something that doesn't really have anything to do with us."

The effects of imprisonment have left their scars on the real-life "Exonerated" characters, some literal, some figurative. Cook still has marks carved on his body by convicts who attacked him in prison. Freed from Florida prison, David Keaton cannot get a license to practice his former profession as a horse groomer, even though his felony conviction was later purged. Blank says, "It's not just like, 'Oh, it's a happy ending, they're freed from prison, yay, hooray!' You know, the effects are really not that different from coming home from a war."

Tibbs, for one, forges ahead in Chicago, where he's writing his autobiography in between odd jobs. "As the guys on the road used to say, it was a hellified experience. I don't know if I will ever get over it," he says. "It's changed me in ways I'm not even sure I can articulate. I'm not sure it made me a better person. But I did not allow those times to make me a worse person. I'm not a kid. I'm 61. And yeah, it traumatized my life to an extent, but I'm a persevering bastard. For the most part, it's good to be alive, man."

* * *
"The Exonerated," Actors' Gang, 6209 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Previews, Saturday; runs April 19-June 16. Showtimes are 8 p.m. Preview, $10. Regular shows, $15-$20, with $5 student and senior discounts Thursdays and Sundays. (323) 465-0566.

* * *
Hugh Hart is a regular contributor to Calendar.

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