Entertainment

Real-life death-row drama will set you free

‘the Exonerated” is about a very exclusive club no one would ever want to join: those who made it out of death row alive.

Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen’s play tells the real stories of six of them — eventually declared innocent, they were freed after years, sometimes decades, behind bars.

“The Exonerated” was a big off-Broadway hit when it debuted in 2002, and this 10th-anniversary revival still packs an emotional punch.

Directed then, as now, by Bob Balaban, the show is sparsely set up, with a rotating lineup of actors in their street clothes reading the script from behind lecterns.

Blank and Jensen don’t editorialize: They let their subjects speak for themselves. The entire script is made up from court transcripts and interviews with people like Gary Gauger, falsely accused of killing his parents, and Sunny Jacobs who, along with her husband, was falsely accused of shooting two cops.

As in 2002, a core company is augmented by rotating actors. At a recent performance, Brian Dennehy gave startled dignity to Gauger, and Stockard Channing was absolutely heartbreaking as Jacobs.

Channing is known for tough-as-nails roles, but here she reveals a startling fragility as a gentle soul chewed up by the system. (Jacobs will play herself from Sept. 25 to 30.)

The show goes back and forth among the stories, with a chilling focus on how the cases were bungled.

Dopey teenager Kerry Max Cook (Chris Sarandon) was convicted on the testimony of “a fingerprint guy whose knowledge of fingerprints at that point was a six-month correspondence school.”

Gauger tried to explain how he thought the crimes could have been committed, hypothetically speaking, only to see his “vision statement” used as a confession.

And then there’s life in prison. Cook was raped and branded by fellow inmates. Robert Earl Hayes (JD Williams) was harassed by guards.

The show is presented just as it was 10 years ago, but might have been more effective had it been updated with a new case or two. Because the stories are from the 1970s to ’90s, some may get the impression that wrongful imprisonment is a thing of the past.

Still, “The Exonerated” remains possibly the best example of this particular style of docu-theater. Its minimalist approach makes the piece speak even more powerfully to both mind and heart.