“This is where we’re going to tell stories, now,” said David Cescarini, Artistic Director of Next Act Theatre Saturday night. He spoke from center stage at Next Act’s brand new theater on South Water Street, a place that just a few months ago was a massive and bare warehouse with a dusty concrete floor.
The occasion was the opening weekend of the new Next Act’s inaugural show, The Exonerated, which takes the idea of “theater as storytelling” very seriously. Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen’s play is drawn entirely from interview and court transcripts from six Americans who were wrongly sentenced to death and had their sentences reversed after spending years on death row.
When it was first presented in New York nine years ago, the actors (many of them well-known Hollywood stars) sat in a row with their scripts on music stands in front of them. It’s thus a curious choice to inaugurate a new theater space. It offers the chance to showcase the work of nine actors in a cast that included familiar Milwaukee faces like James Pickering, Bo Johnson, Tami Workentin and Jonathan Wainwright. But a minimal staging of the original just wouldn’t do.
Director Edward Morgan frees his ensemble from the folding chairs, animating the stage with movement. The use of various stage areas and platforms that keeps the narrative clear and allows the actors to fully inhabit their characters. It makes the stories come alive, but there is something both lost and gained in this approach. The simplicity of the original approach—the constant reminder that the actors are reading from a documentary record—certainly gave the play an added potency.
There is still powerful stuff here, and not just because the stories speak for themselves. Morgan keeps the performances understated, letting the events register without histrionics. Wainwright is particularly effective as Kerry Max Cook, a man whose recounts the horrific circumstances of his imprisonment with a cool simplicity that seems to mask a deeply existential pain.
This is a play dedicated to social awareness and social change. But makes its case with simple, human stories that reach deep into our conscience. It’s a great way for Next Act to christen its new space, now ready for years of stories to come.
