by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen
directed by Bob Balaban

presented by The Culture Project, Dede Harris, Mort Swinsky, David Elliott & Patrick Blake, Jane Bergere, Ruth Hendel and Chery Weisenfeld.

the opening night cast featured: Charles Brown, David Brown, Jr, Jill Clayburgh, Richard Dreyfuss, Sara Gilbert, Bruce Kronenberg, Philip Levy, Curtis McClairn, Jay O. Saunders, April Yvette Thompson

at 45 Bleecker Theatre, NYC

The list of artist that would lend their talents to The Exonerated is nothing short of a ‘who’s who’ in theatre and film. Over the two years the list of luminaries that joined the cast included: Lynn Redgrave, Kathleen Turner, Judy Collins, Mia Farrow, Peter Gallagher, Delroy Lindo, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Alanis Morrisette and Joe Morton, to name just a very few.

The Exonerated was the first show I would produce professionally. It was such a special show - made even moreso in that one of the writers was Erik Jensen, one of my old friends from the liminal stage days. It would also introduce me to some Broadway producers, one of whom, Cheryl Weisenfeld, I would have the pleasure of working with for years to come.

The play is a series of intersecting monologues culled from 40 interviews with former death-row inmates who were eventually proven innocent and released. The play's 12 subjects were freed through an appeals process that left them imprisoned on death row for as long as 20 years. The work combines first-person narrative with legal records to tell the stories of six wrongfully convicted inmates: Delbert Tibbs, Kerry Max Cook, Gary Gauger, David Keaton, Robert Earl Hayes and Sunny Jacobs, and their paths to freedom. The production is performed by 10 actors seated behind music stands. Their accounts of the freed convicts emphasize their lives after being sentenced to death, including much of the legal proceedings that gained their exoneration.

The reviews for the show were astonishing:

“Jaw Dropping. Directed with elegant spareness by Bob Balaban.”
- Ben Brantley, The New York Times

“Ten great actors will rock your view of the world, justice and the American way.” - WOR Radio

…. and perhaps most importantly:

“What has been done tonight through this play is one of the most extraordinary events I have ever seen and it will do more to promote justice than any literary efforts I have seen.” - Janet Reno, Former Attorney General of the United States

Ms. Reno was right. When we played the show in Chicago, the then Illinois Governor George Ryan attended one of the performances. As he was leaving the theater, Ryan called the play "gut-wrenching" and said it "just shows you what's wrong with the system and said it was unlike anything he had experienced. He would late declare a moratorium on the death penalty and abolish it from the state of Illinois.

The Exonerated would play 608 performances - an astonishing run for an Off Broadway play. It would win numerous awards, including the Drama Desk and the Lucille Lortel Award, embark on a U.S. Tour, open at the Riverside Theatre in London and turned into a film, starring Susan Sarandon, Brian Denehy and Danny Glover. Dozens of companies would later produce their own versions of the piece throughout the world.