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Dramaturging the “Truth” in The Exonerated: Ethics, Counter-Text, and Activism in Documentary Theatre Christine Simonian Bean (bio) Although the ethics of documentary theatre are complicated from the start—even if the artists desire objectivity, they are always removed from the initial events and are thus constructing a version of the truth—the complexity increases when the production is remounted at a different time than the original. How does the dramaturg work on historical documentary pieces that seek to champion particular social messages? And how does the dramaturg respond when new facts come to light that trouble them? The issue is unique to documentary theatre, where the notion of truth is often politically charged and contingent on information available at a certain time. This essay explores the role of the dramaturg in connection with activist documentary theatre and the inherent ethics involved in the process. The dramaturg has a part in determining what is and is not understood as “true” in a documentary production (for the production team, actors, and audience), and thus has a responsibility to both artistic and social communities that extends beyond merely serving the text. The essay, then, is something of a dilemma tale: on the one hand, it depicts how critical the dramaturg’s role can be in revealing the constructedness of truth in documentary theatre. On the other, it illuminates how the political realities of an activist, socially engaged production might force the creative team to make hard but informed decisions about the way that complicated, sometimes inconvenient truths are treated. The dramaturg can be pivotal in guiding the process. While the ethics may not be explicit, the stakes are high. In order to tease out these issues, I examine a 2013 production of The Exonerated (2002). Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen’s documentary play is composed almost entirely of personal interviews with six individuals convicted and sent to death row for crimes they did not commit.1 Inspired to create the play by an experience at a Columbia University death-penalty conference, Jensen observed: “Everyone here is already an activist or a defense attorney. They all know these stories. This is preaching to the choir; these aren’t the people who need to be having these experiences” (Blank and Jensen 2005b, 16). With The Exonerated, Blank and Jensen set out to dramatize the actual life-and-death circumstances facing the wrongfully convicted for a wider theatre audience. In addition to humanizing the people affected, the play served a dual political function: it publicized the deep flaws in the United States’ criminal justice system, and, more tacitly, called into question the continued function of the death penalty. The Exonerated was staged first by the Actor’s Gang in Los Angeles in 2002, and then Off-Broadway six months later where it won, among other accolades, the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Off-Broadway Play. Since then, it has been staged frequently in various venues across the country. Eleven years after the play’s debut, the Theatre and Interpretation Center at Northwestern University and the Evanston-based Next Theatre Company mounted the production, in partnership with the Center on Wrongful Convictions (CWC) at Northwestern University, one of the first and best-recognized organizations in the country working to right inequities in the criminal justice system. Both professional and student artists made up the cast, and I served as the dramaturg. Interested in interrogating the complexity of wrongful conviction, the director, Cat Miller, asked me to research what occurred in the lives of the six persons exonerated from death row both before [End Page 187] and after the initial production. After a month of sifting through news stories, reports from state-sanctioned commissions, activist blogs, and personal autobiographies, I compiled a detailed timeline of each exoneree’s life. While there were understandable discrepancies between external records and the script, the most significant difference was the well-evidenced reincarceration of Robert Hayes, one of the featured exonerees, for a murder that predated the crime referenced in the play. When it premiered, The Exonerated was known for the factual and emotional veracity of its storytelling. Hayes’s recent conviction, then, posed a set of ethical problems for...
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