ADMIT ONE TO DEATH ROW

Delbert Tibbs fondly remembers growing up in Chicago with a devout Christian mother who taught him the importance of finding those fabled silver linings and bright sides.

"And if there ain't a bright side, maybe you go to working on one," Tibbs says she would add.

His mother should be proud. Tibbs could be the Bright Side poster boy.

In 1974, he was accused of raping a woman and murdering a man in Florida. A year later, he was sentenced to death on a conviction of first-degree murder. After an appeal, he was released from Death Row in 1977 but remained in custody until 1982, when charges were dropped. The details are complicated, but the fact is unambiguous: He was spared from execution for a crime he didn't commit.

Tibbs' story is one of six in Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen's controversial play, The Exonerated, an off-Broadway hit that's touring the country and making its first Texas stop at Casa Mañana Tuesday. The play is performed by actors who, seated on stools, read from a script on a music stand.

A staged reading about former Death Row inmates? Probably not high on anyone's thrill-meter.

The producers realized this, and so they found a surefire way to put bottoms in seats: constantly rotate the cast with celebrities, ala The Vagina Monologues.

Richard Dreyfuss, Robin Williams, Lynn Redgrave and Stockard Channing are among the celebs who have performed the show in New York and on tour. Even some of the real-life former Death Row inmates have appeared in it. The Fort Worth stop features singer/songwriter Lyle Lovett and actress Kathleen Turner, who has also done the show in New York.

Despite the heavy participation of left-leaning celebrities in the cast, The Exonerated is not, the authors contend, an anti-death-penalty screed. They insist that those on both sides of the issue can get something from it.

"Whether you're philosophically for or against the death penalty, nobody wants innocent people to die," Blank says. "As soon as we started hearing people's stories, this play became much less about the issues and much more about these stories, because they're so powerful. . . . Once you start making work that is didactically political, you lose everybody who doesn't agree with you. I think at that point it stops being art."

In the Fort Worth production, six actors portray real-life former inmates: Tibbs, Kerry Max Cook (Lovett), Sunny Jacobs (Turner), Gary Gauger, Robert Earl Hayes and David Keaton. Four more actors play judges, guards, attorneys, spouses, cops, etc.

"I know the stories of all six characters," says Tibbs. "But each time I see it, there are different actors, and they bring different nuances to it, and the stories still hit me."

For the authors, a married couple, bringing the play to stage was a journey that warrants its own play. In fact, they're working on a book about the making of The Exonerated, to be published in 2005 by Simon and Schuster.

The short version: After attending a death penalty conference at New York's Columbia University, they had the idea for a documentary play. They interviewed about 40 former Death Row inmates, traveling to Minnesota, Florida and Texas, which sees about five times as many executions as any other state and has a faster sentence-to-lethal-injection rate.

With financial assistance from 45 Bleecker, the off-Broadway theater where the show runs, they eventually decided on the stories of 11 former inmates. That was cut to six when director Bob Balaban advised them to construct it more like a traditional play. The monologues of the inmates are taken from the interviews, and their stories are interwoven. One of Tibbs' poems, The Cruxifiction Revisited, stitches it all together.

Before The Exonerated opened in New York, actor Tim Robbins invited Blank and Jensen to conduct a workshop reading at his Actor's Gang theater in Los Angeles. Robbins and his significant other, actress Susan Sarandon, both well-known leftist activists, participated in the reading.

To bolster the authors' contention that The Exonerated is not an anti-death-penalty show, they point to at least two celebrities with pro-death-penalty views who have performed in it: Brian Dennehy and Fran Drescher.

"It is not politicized," Kathleen Turner insists. "It is truly about the fact that in our justice system, there have not been enough safeguards to prevent this kind of thing from happening."

Given that the death penalty is an issue that provokes strong reactions from those on both sides, it's no surprise that not everyone thinks that The Exonerated isn't biased.

Dudley Sharp, a Houston-based pro-death-penalty activist, has spent years researching cases and speaking on the subject. He has gone out of his way to e-mail his views of the six Exonerated cases to writers and editors at newspapers in cities where The Exonerated is presented.

He points out that the anti-death-penalty group Open Society Institute is one of the play's financial backers. "There's no way they would fund a play that was neutral on the death penalty," he says.

Because not every case represented in The Exonerated ended with a judgment in which "guilty" was switched to "not guilty" (cases were dismissed for various reasons), Sharp claims the play is not a fair portrayal of Death Row exonerations.

"They have defined 'exonerated' in terms that have nothing to do with actual innocent people. It is just another propaganda tool," he says. "Most of the play isn't really fact, per se, it's philosophy. It's 'how did I survive' and 'how did I get framed in this particular case.' "

Whether philosophy or fact, it's hard to deny that the stories of The Exonerated are compelling.

"What we're really interested in here is the storytelling and the human elements that all different kinds of people who come from different ideological backgrounds can relate to," says Blank.

For Tibbs, The Exonerated was simply another way to get his story out there and another way to show that it is possible to find that silver lining.

As he says in one of the play's best lines: "If I internalized all the anger and the pain and hurt, I'd be dead already. They wouldn't have to execute me."

The Exonerated

8 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, and 2 and 7 p.m. Feb. 22

Casa Mañana

3101 W. Lancaster Ave.

Fort Worth

$23-$60

(817) 332-2272, Ext. 3

Six saved from the brink

What is it like seeing your story told onstage? For the six former Death Row inmates whose stories make up The Exonerated, it's not fun -- but it does often seem necessary. Four of them -- Kerry Max Cook, Gary Gauger, Delbert Tibbs and Sunny Jacobs -- have even performed their roles onstage.

"They have been a really important part of it," says playwright Jessica Blank, who wrote the play with her husband, Erik Jensen. "Imagine the hardest experiences of your life being enacted onstage in front of you. From what we understand from them, it has been very cathartic, and, in some cases, very healing."

Here's a quick look at the six exonerated people represented in the play:

• Kerry Max Cook was accused of killing and sexually mutilating a woman in Tyler and served 22 years before being released, when DNA evidence was introduced. His story is voiced by Lyle Lovett in the Casa Mañana performance. Cook now lives in upstate New York and is

married to a scientist named Sandra (also a character in the play). They have one son.

• Gary Gauger was accused of killing his parents in northern Illinois. According to Blank and Jensen, he was persuaded by interrogators to give a hypothetical account of how he could have killed his parents, and that statement was used at his trial as a confession. He was released several years later after two bikers in a motorcycle gang confessed to the murder. He is now married to a woman named Sue (also a character in the play), and they live on an Illinois farm.

• Robert Earl Hayes was accused of killing a young woman in Mississippi in the '70s. Reasonable doubt was eventually found in the form of the victim's ex-boyfriend -- who was imprisoned in an identical rape and murder in another state. Hayes was acquitted of all charges. Hayes lives in rural Mississippi with his wife, Georgia (also a character).

• Sonia "Sunny" Jacobs was accused of killing two police officers in Florida and spent 16 years behind bars, along with her husband, Jesse. They claimed to have been kidnapped, and that the kidnapper shot the officers. The alleged kidnapper agreed to testify against Sunny and Jesse in exchange for immunity from Death Row. He later confessed to the crime, and Sunny was exonerated. Jesse had already been executed, however. Kathleen Turner portrays Jacobs, who now teaches yoga and lives in Ireland with a man who was also exonerated from Death Row.

• David Keaton was accused of killing a police officer in northern Florida in 1970, even though there was no evidence linking Keaton to the scene and he had an alibi. Later, a lawyer found evidence linking an armed robbery ring to the murder, and Keaton was released. He lives in the house in which he grew up.

• Delbert Tibbs was accused of killing a man and raping a woman in Florida in 1974. Although he was released after posting bond in 1977 after the witness was determined to be unreliable, charges weren't completely dropped until 1982. In prison he became a political activist, and a movement to free him formed on the outside. Folk singer Pete Seeger even wrote a song for him, Ode to Delbert Tibbs. Tibbs has remained an anti-death penalty activist and has done several odd jobs, including truck driver.

"I was damned near starving to death before this play happened, and it has been a tremendous help to me," says Tibbs, who lives in his hometown, Chicago.

After each performance of The Exonerated, the actors ask for donations, the money from which goes directly to the six people portrayed.

-- Mark Lowry

Sources: The Exonerated Playbill, www.floridacapitalcases.state.fl.us