Vanessa Redgrave has confirmed that she will be playing the role of Sunny Jacobs at the Reprieve Gala Performance of The Exonerated at the Riverside Studios on Thursday 4 May 2006. Join us for a pre-performance reception and after show discussion with Clive Stafford Smith. To buy your tickets call the Riverside Studios on 020 8237 1111 and ask for tickets for the Reprieve Gala Performance.
Imagine everything you did between the years of 1976 and 1992.
Now remove all of it.
Those 16 years were taken away from Sunny Jacobs, convicted and sentenced to death for a crime she did not commit. As Reprieve supporters will know, her story is not unique.
Writers Jessica Blank and Eric Jensen have brought the real stories of 6 Death Row survivors into the public arena with their hit play, The Exonerated. The play was a sensation in New York, and had its UK debut at the Edinburgh Festival last summer, collecting a shelf-full of awards, including the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award, which was accepted at a moving ceremony by Sunny Jacobs herself. Starting its London debut at The Riverside Studios, the play brings to light the real stories, told in their own words, of six very ordinary people caught up in a nightmare in the criminal justice system.
Reprieve will be hosting a week of after show talks and also a Gala fundraising evening. Speakers will include Clive Stafford Smith.
The writers Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen explain how the play came about:
"Over the summer of 2000 we travelled across the United States and sat in people’s living rooms as they related to us the most amazing stories we had ever heard. All of those we interviewed had been sentenced to death, and had spent anywhere from 2 to 22 years on death row and were subsequently found innocent and freed by the State. These interviews form the core of The Exonerated. We also spent countless hours in the dusty record rooms of state courthouses, pored through thousands of microfiche files and cardboard boxes full of affidavits, depositions, police interrogations and court transcripts in order to fill in the story gaps. We pulled quotes from newspapers, TV footage and magazines.
We want to stress that with a few exceptions, each word spoken in the play came from public record: ‘found’ legal documents, a transcript, a letter or an article about the case. For staging purposes we condensed, added, theatricalised, combined and extrapolated dramatic/comedic moments for the presentation. But the vast majority of the piece is as it was said by the actual participants.
We are not responsible for the content of the public record or of the interviews in any way, except to report what was said to us by the exonerated. That said, none of these interviews, transcripts or the play itself should be considered completely representative of these cases. A full transcript of a trial can be somewhere in the realm of 50 to 60 thousand pages. With only 90 minutes to relate the events of these lives there are bound to be differences of opinion, omission of details and technical legal matters which cannot be fully represented.
It is our intention to relate as fully as possible what it is like to be wrongly accused and convicted, what it is like to be on death row, and what it is like to get out and be in the world again. This is not primarily a play about anger and revenge (although these feelings do come into play). It is really a play about strength, hope, redemption, and forgiveness."
For more information about the play, visit www.theexonerated.co.uk
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