Review: THE EXONERATED at Black Theatre Troupe

Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen ‘s THE EXONERATED premiered in 2002, but the injustices it dramatizes in the nation’s criminal justice system have not abated. According to the National Registry of Exonerations' 2024 annual report, 147 people were exonerated in the United States that year alone, after losing an average of 13.5 years of their lives to wrongful imprisonment for crimes they did not commit. Seventy-eight percent of those exonerees were people of color, and 60% were Black. Collectively, the exonerated lost 1,980 years of their lives to incarceration, while state compensation and civil damages have, since 1989, exceeded $4.6 billion. And the driving force behind much of it, then and now, remains distressingly consistent: Official misconduct – falsified evidence, coerced witnesses, and withheld exculpatory information – accounted for 71% of exonerations.

Those figures aren't backdrop. They are the reason this play still matters more than two decades after it was written, and Black Theatre Troupe's current production understands that implicitly. It never lets the six stories on stage feel like history. It makes them feel like this year's report.

At the center of this poignant testimonial is Ken Love, whose stature and articulation bring a weathered, meditative gravity to his character Delbert Tibbs, the itinerant Florida preacher and poet convicted of murder and rape in 1974 and freed three years later when the case against him collapsed. His years on Florida's death row never fully extinguished his wit or his faith in language. While he pronounces unequivocally that the system sucks, he rejects cynicism. He intones the despair of a prisoner caught in the system (“How do we, the people, get outta this hole, what’s the way to fight?”), yet then reclaims hope (“It is not easy to be a poet here. Yet I sing. I sing.”).

Maren Maclean, as Sunny Jacobs, delivers a beautifully nuanced performance, balancing quiet, controlled devastation with optimism and the resolve of a woman who has turned her journey from wife and mother to condemned prisoner ultimately into a life of advocacy and reform. Jacobs was sentenced to death in 1976 for the murders of two police officers on a Florida highway, based largely on testimony from a co-defendant who later admitted his role in the killings. She spent five years on death row before her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and she wasn't freed until 1992, sixteen years after her arrest.

Ken Bailes presents Kerry, convicted at nineteen and ultimately freed because of DNA evidence, as a man visibly still wounded and working to reconcile who he was with what the system tried to make of him. Chad T. Krolczyk plays Gary, an Illinois farmer who was driven by an exhausting interrogation into making statements that investigators turned into a confession that he murdered his parents, with a jittery, defensive energy that speaks to trauma never fully processed. Theodore C. Lott, III brings a slow-burning intensity to Robert’s account of his conviction based largely on a single partial fingerprint and an all-white jury. Ryan L. Jenkins finds unexpected tenderness in Georgia, Robert's wife, threading warmth through testimony that could easily curdle into pure bitterness. Paul Perkins, as David, freed only after another man confessed to the crime, is unnervingly matter-of-fact, a choice that makes the injustice he describes land harder precisely because he refuses to editorialize it for us.

Kim Richard moves fluidly between Sandra and Sue, the supportive wives, respectively, of Kerry and Gary. Tony Blosser, riveting in his multiple roles, and Seth Scott round out the company with the kind of energy this piece demands.

Matthew Wiener's direction is exactly what audiences have come to expect from him: insightful, unhurried, and taut in the way that matters. Every pause earns its weight, every overlap of voices lands with precision. Wiener lets the power of plain speech, the heavy silences, and the spartan set designed by Tiana Torrilhon-Wood convey the weight of history. The stage is bare and harsh just as the truth is. The result is a production that never once feels like a re-enactment but what it is meant to be: testimony.

The final image says as much as anything spoken all evening. David, alone in a single cone of light, arm reaching upward, stands before the word EXONERATED, glowing cold blue above him, while the rest of the cast watches in silence from the bleachers. It isn’t a triumphant gesture. It’s a man reaching for something the system took from him that can’t fully be given back.

This is a production of real craft in service of real urgency: beautifully directed, powerfully acted, and unwilling to let its audience leave comfortable. THE EXONERATED asks hard questions about who our justice system prioritizes. Black Theatre Troupe answers with theatre that demands to be seen and with a force that leaves the audience shaken, grateful, and angry in roughly equal measure.

THE EXONERATED runs through September 27th at: tember 11 - 27

Helen K. Mason Performing Arts Center, 1333 E. Washington Street, Phoenix, AZ

Black Theatre Troupe -- https://www.blacktheatretroupe.org/ -- 602-258-8128

Photo credit to Tim Trumble