March 7, 2006

The Actors’ Gang performs the hard-hitting
play The Exonerated at UCSB Campbell Hall

Summary Facts:

• The Actors’ Gang
• The Exonerated
• The play is a fact-based powerful examination of the lives of death row inmates who are exonerated for their crimes
• The Actors’ Gang, one of Los Angeles’ most daring and inventive theater ensembles, has produced over 68 plays and won over 100 awards
• Thursday, April 20 / 8 pm
• UCSB Campbell Hall
• General public: $40 / UCSB students: $18
• Tickets/information: UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535

Under the artistic direction of Academy Award-winner Tim Robbins, The Actors’ Gang—one of Los Angeles’ most inventive theater ensembles—performs the off-Broadway hit The Exonerated on Thursday, April 20 at 8 pm in UCSB Campbell Hall. The Exonerated is a riveting evening based on tales of death row inmates whose wrongful convictions were overturned. These extraordinary stories illuminate the way our justice system works and teach us about our human capacities for both cruelty and compassion. The San Francisco Examiner writes about the group, “The Gang is an enormously talented and versatile ensemble with a genius for refreshingly engaged political humor,” while the Daily News claims about The Exonerated that “ripped-from-the-transcripts drama doesn’t get much harder-hitting.”

Playwrights Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen were moved to action after attending a conference on the death penalty at Columbia University in 2000. Several months of staggering research later, they spent six weeks traveling America, interviewing 40 of the then 89 former death row prisoners and their families. (The number of exonerated is now over 100.) Developing a structure for a reading version of the play, they collaborated with Bob Balaban who directed such actors as Susan Sarandon, Richard Dreyfuss, Tim Robbins, Steve Buscemi, Cherry Jones, Charles Dutton and David Morse in several staged readings in fall 2001.

Blank and Jensen realized that the play needed to be clearer about how this unfathomable fate could have happened to the exonerated people they interviewed. So they got down to six stories that could be told more fully about people accused of heinous crimes they did not commit and who paid a price too horrible to imagine—a combined 53 years in prison. Blank and Jensen hit the road again, digging into court transcripts and case files, microfiche files and cardboard boxes filled with affidavits, depositions, police interrogations and courtroom testimony. This painstaking work led to the final version of The Exonerated. The play has raised more than $500,000 for the exonerated people whose stories it tells and raised awareness about flaws in the American justice system. The Exonerated won 2003 Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards.

The Actors’ Gang is one of Los Angeles’ most enduring theatre ensembles. Founded in 1981 by a group of renegade theatre artists, the Gang’s mission is to create bold, original works for the stage and daring reinterpretations of the classics. Its work is raw, immediate, socially minded and crafted with the highest artistic standards. Over the course of its first 20 years the group has produced 68 plays and won over 100 awards, winning acclaim for interpretations of Shakespeare, Bruchner, Brecht, Moliere, Aeschylus, Ibsen and Chekhov, while developing in workshop new plays that address the world today through a prism of satire, popular culture and raucous stagecraft.

Through co-productions, The Actors’ Gang presented the West Coast Premiere of Eric Bogosian’s Suburbia with the Namaste Theatre Company, Roger Guenver Smith’s A Huey P. Newton Story and Danny Hoch’s Jails, Hospitals, Hip Hop with Center Theatre Group, and Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella with The Cornerstone Theatre Company. The Actors’ Gang has toured with productions as the US representative at the Edinburgh Festival and to New York’s Public Theatre with Carnage, A Comedy and with The Imaginary Invalid to the Rushmore Festival in New York. In 2001 Bat Boy, A Musical, developed at the Actors’ Gang, won the Lucille Lortel and Outer Critics Award for best new musical Off-Broadway in New York.

Theater-goers are invited to stay after the performance for a Meet-the-Artists discussion.

In related programming UCSB Arts & Lectures will present a special screening of the documentary After Innocence on Thursday, May 11 at 7:30 pm at UCSB Campbell Hall.

This Sundance Festival Jury Prize-winning film tells the dramatic and compelling story of seven innocent men wrongfully imprisoned for decades and then released after DNA evidence proved their innocence. The film, co-presented with the UCSB Center on Police Practices and Community, was hailed as “both riveting and disturbing” by the Village Voice. Director Jessica Sanders and exoneree Herman Atkins will introduce the film and take questions after the screening.

The Actors’ Gang is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures and sponsored by the Daily Nexus, KCLU Public Radio, and the Best Western Beachside Inn. Tickets are $40 for the general public and $18 for UCSB students who must show valid ID at ticket purchase and the evening of the show. Ticket prices are subject to convenience fees. Tickets are on sale now and can also be purchased at the door, if still available.

For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.

Editor: For photos, please call
George Yatchisin at (805) 893-3494.