The Exonerated
Assembly @ Queen's Hall, Edinburgh Festival Fringe
My Pyramids
Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Claire Fox
posted 7 September 2005

Stories of how innocent people end up on Death Row - told in their own words - are undoubtedly dramatic, but do they make theatre just because they are read out by actors on a stage? The Exonerated uses the victims' own words, garnered from interviews, letters, court reports, to allow an audience to share the frustration and despair of those hapless people who find themselves facing the electric chair when they know they have done no wrong.

No doubt the audience feels empathy. There but by the grace of God…The bad luck of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, the bad faith of a criminal justice system too trigger happy in finding someone - anyone - to take the rap for horrendous crimes to bother investigating the evidence. Of course the audience gains insight. Hearing the details of how a son, in shock after finding his parents brutally murdered, becomes the fall guy and is charged with their murder, makes the cold facts come to life. We gasp when told that the prosecution fingerprint witness who effectively condemned Kerry Max Cook (played with great subtlety and feeling by Aiden Quinn), was dubbed an expert only on the basis of having done a six month correspondence course. We bristle with indignation at the boy who made the mistake of stealing a deputy sheriff's car as a joy-riding teenager and was always going to be fitted up by a vengeful cop for some future crime. We understand the class dynamics that explains why the university professor who should have been a chief suspect for one of the murders remains free while a flash, good-looking 19-year-old loses his youth to death row.

We certainly get a full gallery of humanity represented on the stage, from hippies to wide boys. That 19-year-old, when released as a middle aged man, poignantly continues to wear clothes covered in zips, as though still a teenager in the 1970s. We hear the humour of some, the bitterness of others. While all the victims of injustice show an admirable gritty determination not to be cowed or defeated, we can detect that some are damaged by the brutality of years in jail - the beatings, the bullying, the rapes, the cruelty of regular descriptions of exactly what electrocution entails. But that all humanity is here is simply because these are indeed real people and life is indeed a rich tapestry.

Nonetheless I felt a nagging sense of discomfort that all we were offered was a documentary delivered as bravura acting, with little of the ambiguity and challenge that theatre might bring to any issue. The Exonerated is celebrated as campaigning theatre. But this is campaign-lite, politics as sentiment and even smugly self-congratulatory. The issue is rather too comfortable, especially for audiences in the UK. We were being told tales of the viciousness, the racism, the unfairness of the US justice system - a topic so well worn here that it is almost an orthodoxy. The wife of one of the characters repeatedly told us she hadn't been a bleeding heart liberal and had in fact supported the death penalty before her husband was wrongfully found guilty. But one suspects that the 'play' is really a means by which audiences of bleeding heart liberals can congratulate themselves for being on the side of the angels. Even in the US - where the show is a hit - the possibility that the themes explored might confront the hang em and flog em brigade would be limited. The clue is in the title. These people were all innocent, and subsequently exonerated. The harder argument is surely to find the humanity in the rapist who murders a young girl or to argue against capital punishment for the guilty.

The elision between theatre and real life was brought vividly to life at the end of the performance I saw. On stage one of the most powerful testimonies was from Sunny Jacobs, played beautifully by April Yvette Thompson. She and her husband were both held on death row for the murder of two policemen, which they witnessed but didn't commit. They wrote hundreds of letters to each other over the years, and even conducted a literary sexual relationship with the aid of Japanese dictionaries to protect their privacy from the prison officers who vetted their correspondence. The story had a savage ending as Sonny's husband was executed before he could be exonerated. His death became infamous because the electric chair malfunctioned and he was given three huge electric shocks before he died. I was not alone in being moved to tears. At the end of the performance, Aiden Quinn announced that the real Sunny Jacobs was in the audience. She received rapturous applause and a standing ovation. I felt queasy, not just at the sentimentality. What exactly were we applauding her for? Her life, her misfortune, her story as spoken to others and repeated verbatim by an actress? Is being a victim sufficient grounds for being lionised?

While the play is directed excellently by Bob Balaban, with timing and acting able to hold the interest for 90 minutes, it is hard to know how to comment on the 'writers' Erik Jensen and Jessica Blank. They may well have done a good job as the editors of other people's words, but writers seems an inappropriate appellation. Overall, the reliance on transcribed verbatim testimony to deliver the drama of the piece felt like a cheat. The authenticity and truth of the work cannot be challenged; it's rather too easily given. After all these are 'their' words, this is 'truth'. What marks the fictional and imaginative world of theatre is that it needs to try much harder to arrive at some sort of truth.

In that regard, one must admire the idea behind another example of personal testimony, although this time fictionalised, of 'My Pyramids, or how I got fired from the Dairy Queen and ended up in Abu Ghraib, by Pvt. Lynndie England' really by Canadian playwright Judith Thompson. This is not biography - despite the subtitle the real Lynndie England did not work at Dairy Queen for example. This instead is a brave attempt to fill out the character of Private Lynndie England, the American female soldier so infamously captured in photographs form Abu Ghraib, 'a poster child for the…prison scandal'. A sole actress, depicting a heavily pregnant Lynndie, reflects on how she has ended up the subject of international disgust at America's treatment of Iraqi prisoners. Her imagined monologue is Thompson's 'free associative improvisation around the question of female notoriety' (programme notes). Yes a grinning England put her thumb up in front of a pyramid of naked men. However that was only 'one second in a whole year', but she knows it's that one second gesture she will be remembered for, while ruefully hoping that 'One day I'll be a hero', a new Annie Oakley.

The premise of the piece seems to be an exploration of how America itself created the conditions for one of its own to act as a cruel torturer of Iraqi prisoners. There are no surprises in the thesis put forward. Lynndie is a victim too. She's poorly educated - (one of play's worst lines is 'would like to torture Math'). There's sexual abuse - 'Didn't do anything to them hadn't been done to me in the club house'. Needless to say she was involved in bullying at school. Slippery slope etc. Needless to say, she's dirt poor, at the bottom of the heap socially, powerless, so she relishes the rare opportunities to exert power over others. What she did to 'Muslim monkeys', dog collar and all, is no worse than what society has done to her. You get the gist. In some ways, that's the problem. This is just too obvious to contain much interest, because once we've got the gist, it feels there is not much else to say.

One potentially interesting tension in the piece, is Lynndie's recitation of the abusive comments about her if you google her name (65,000 entries exist): 'If I was an actor, I'd have to call that a bad review'. She is disturbed by the vile and gross depictions of her as a trailer trash dog. It felt at times as though the writer wanted us to see beyond the white trash caricature. And yet, in many ways the play reproduced the same prejudices. She constantly chews a huge amount of gum - on several occasions this is the main action on stage. She orders KFC. Attempts at making her seem like any ordinary American girl, with dreams of domestic bliss, a cool boyfriend and a gang of friends for life, feel patronising about the aspirations of the working class. Her obsessive concern at how many people have described her as ugly from the photographs makes her seems shallow rather than humanly vulnerable.

The explanation for the pyramid - it was 'my idea…always had an interest in choreography' - makes her sound crassly insensitive and stupid rather than creative. Worse, the imagined thrill England tells us she got from bullying a girl at school, burning her clothes and chopping up her wooden leg, makes Lynndie more of a monster than already depicted. She's typecast here as grimly as any tabloid newspaper could hope for. Thompson tells us that she wanted to show England as a 'disadvantaged pawn of her superiors, performing the will of the Pentagon'. However, it is the trailer trash American GIs who come out as the villains. The depiction of England's boyfriend Charlie, who comes across as the main instigator of the worse abuses, and the other guys, drives home an stereotyped view of US soldiers as lower than the low and is little different from the racist stereotypes which lead people to regard all Iraqis as no better than animals.

The performance doesn't overstay it's welcome at only 40 minutes, though at times the pace is still too slow. Wanetta Storms' acting is a marvel to behold, but the material didn't allow for a wonderful performance. And why, oh why was it in the main Traverse theatre? This needed a more intimate space. On the day I saw it, barely 40 people sat scattered in the auditorium, and the actress deserves full credit for filling the space as much as she could.

I admire the idea of this play, but it felt too slight and underwritten to allow much enlightenment. As an imagined personal testimony, it at least had to work at its art, rather than falling back on verbatim material, but I'm afraid it needed to work harder. Director Ross Manson notes that 'Judith's remarkable play uses a speculative version of Ms England as a point of entry into…a much larger metaphorical consideration of our America'. This sounds promising, but the play just doesn't deliver. The fascinating real life phenomena of the soldiers filming the abuse, like holiday snaps, could be ripe for fictional exploration. What does it say about our voyeuristic culture? What is the impact of reality TV on everyday behaviour? Instead Lynndie explains tritely - 'Is there a girl in America who has not been videotaped 'doing it'?'. This is not a failure of imagination on England's part, but rather indicates the playwright's unwillingness to use the facts as they are known to explore dramatically all the possibilities. Interestingly, My Pyramids, similarly to The Exonerated, relies on non-fiction to compensate for lack of artistic depth. The programme is full of interesting quotes, poems and articles about the state of America, the issue of torture and the reality of Abu Ghraib. It was as though this was a necessary heavyweight counter to the substance the play itself lacked.