Witness to the Execution
by Sam Hurwitt

Sister Helen Prejean's first-person account of becoming the spiritual advisor of a convicted murderer on death row, the 1993 book Dead Man Walking has been adapted several times. It's probably best known for the 1995 movie written and directed by Tim Robbins that earned an Academy Award for Susan Sarandon in the role of Sister Helen. An operatic version with music by Jake Heggie and a libretto by Terrence McNally debuted at San Francisco Opera in 2000.

The stage adaptation that Robbins wrote has a lower profile, and that's by design. Starting in 2003, Robbins and the Dead Man Walking School Theatre Project turned the play over exclusively to schools in order to spur discussion of the death penalty among young people. Any school putting on the play has to involve at least two other academic departments in putting together coursework about the book and the issues surrounding the death penalty.

The play has been done at a dozen colleges and high schools in the Bay Area and more than 170 schools around the country, but for the first time a professional theatre company is partnering with a school to produce it. City Lights Theater Company in San Jose is teaming up with Notre Dame High School across the street to put on the play this January and February, featuring executive artistic director Lisa Mallette as Sister Helen and Thomas Gorrebeeck as inmate Matthew Poncelet, Robbins's hybrid character in both the play and the movie of the real-life prisoners Patrick Sonnier and Robert Willie that Prejean counseled and talks about in her book.

In its distillation of the story the play is patterned after Robbins's screenplay, but the stage version uses a number of different theatrical techniques to tell the story, with narration from the Sister Helen character and projections of statistics about the actual practice of the death penalty.

"Tim asked me to fax him all the quotes from the Bible I could get that speak for vengeance, then all the quotes from the Bible I could think of where it calls for mercy," Prejean says on the phone from New Orleans. "He got them somewhat in the movie, but in the play it's very striking when we're coming to the end and the biblical quotes come in on both sides. Everyone has that ambivalence, and the Bible as we well know is quoted selectively, because anybody with a religious bent wants to quote the Bible. Tim wants to hit people with the ambivalence that's even in the Bible, so people can make decisions in their own heart."

A Roman Catholic nun in the Congregation of St. Joseph since 1957, the 70-year-old Louisiana native has been a tireless advocate for the abolition of the death penalty since she began her correspondence with Sonnier in 1982 and he became the first of several prisoners Prejean counseled on death row and was there for when they were executed.

"When I came out of the execution chamber after I watched the first man electrocuted to death, it was right after midnight," Prejean says. "I came outside the prison gates and threw up. I'd never watched a human being be killed. I knew this man for two and a half years, had accompanied him, dealt with the horrible part of his crime and dealt with the murder victims' families as well and their great suffering. So I was there in the dark, I was throwing up, I'd just watched a person be killed in front of my eyes, and I remember thinking the people are never going to see this. It's a secret ritual. It's done behind prison walls, there are very few select witnesses, and I had been a witness, so I had to tell the story."

It was Sarandon who initially read Prejean's book and urged her partner Robbins to read it too. "It took her nine months to get Tim to read it," Prejean says. That led to them making the movie together with a great deal of consultation with Prejean herself. And some years later it was Prejean who convinced Robbins to adapt it into a play.

"I had read in The New Yorker that every day of the year Death of a Salesman is performed somewhere in the world," she recalls. "So I started talking to Tim: if we had a play of Dead Man Walking, it could be performed over and over, and every time people perform it, it could work as only drama can do to bring people close to the issue. It took a while to convince Tim of that, but then he did it. He's getting no royalties for it; it's purely to get the discourse going."

Among the issues the play brings up, and that Prejean raises in her talks and her books Dead Man Walking and The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions, is the racial inequality that seems forever tied to the practice of the death penalty in the United States. It's not just that there are more people of color on death row than white people, but more overwhelmingly still it's people convicted of killing white victims who are given the death penalty.

"In theory we reserve the death penalty for the worst of the worst murders," Prejean explains. "In practice the opening qualifier for the worst of the worst is, did you kill a white person? Race is huge in this--race of the victim is what's huge in this--because when people of color are killed it barely even registers on the radar screen of prosecutors' offices. If you don't highly value the person who's been murdered, no matter how terrible the circumstances, you're not going to go to the expense to seek the ultimate penalty, with all its appeals. Of the thousand-plus people who have been executed, 8 out of every 10 killed white people. Of the people on death row now, 8 out of every 10 killed white people. It's no different in California or Texas or wherever."

Not only don't people know all the facts about the death penalty, but Prejean has found that most people haven't really examined their attitudes about the morality of state-sponsored executions at all. That more than anything is what the play, the film and her first-person accounts in print and in person are designed to address.

"It's not that people have thought about this and are wedded to it," Prejean says. "They never think about it, because it's not a moral issue that affects most people personally. People have busy lives, and they don't dig into this. That's one thing we know: the more people look into this, the quicker the support for it plummets. I'm getting ready to go to the UK for two weeks, giving talks, and that was the favorite question of people in Europe: 'Why do you still have the death penalty? Over half of the countries in the world now do not have the death penalty. What is it about the people of the United States that is so tied to vengeance?' they ask me, and now I know the answer. They're not tied to vengeance. It's just superficial response: terrible crime done, outraged over the crime, deserves to die, end of reflection. So going through the experience of a play will bring people in as close as possible to this without actually being there, because there's nothing like drama to bring you there."

Although the educational value of the play is self-evident, particularly when paired with related academic curricula as per the terms of the project, one obvious question is why the play hasn't been opened up to professional theatres in order to expand the dialogue among adults and teenagers alike.

"Tim wanted to turn it over to the kids to do first, and then when the project's over he will do the final edition, and then he will put it into theatres," Prejean explains. "That was always his idea. We have like four more years to go on this project. We'll give it to the young people first, because young people are the ones who are asking the most questions on all the major issues of our day. In terms of gay rights, in terms of tolerance, they are ahead of older people on these issues. That's where the soil is tilled, and he wanted to get in there."

"Of course it has only ever been done at educational institutions in the past," says City Lights executive artistic assistant Amanda Folena, who's directing the production and acting as company point person with the School Theatre Project. "So we worked with Steven Crimaldi, the national coordinator, to try to establish a partnership in which the actors would be professional actors in the appropriate age range for the characters, but we would bring in the high school students to be apprentices for the design elements, for stage management, so that they understood not only what the play was about but also in a larger sense in terms of the theatre in general."

City Lights is also working with Notre Dame on projects related to Dead Man Walking in its art and music departments, and discussing the book and the death penalty in the English department.

Folena hadn't yet had a chance to talk with Prejean directly when I spoke to each of them in October, but plans were underway for Folena to visit Prejean for a weekend in December and for them to go to Angola Prison to talk to Eddie Sonnier, who's serving a life sentence for his involvement in the murders for which his brother Patrick was executed. Prejean will attend the January 29 performance at City Lights and take part in a fundraising dinner that same evening.

"I say to the kids, 'The arts and theatre--never let anyone ever tell you that this is fluff stuff, because the arts are the only way we have of bringing us deep into these issues that people otherwise are never going to touch,'" Prejean says. "They're never going to be at an execution. Many of them will never, ever be inside a prison because of the way life is set up to remove people from us. So that's been my mission my whole life. I witnessed, I saw, so I had to tell the story."

Dead Man Walking runs Jan. 21 to Feb. 21 at City Lights Theatre Company. Info at cltc.org.