By Jackie Demaline
Enquirer staff writer

Ensemble Theatre's season opener, The Exonerated, has a bad case of preaching to the converted.

Its subjects are the death penalty and the sickening injustices in our criminal justice system as it earnestly tells the stories of six former Death Row inmates in their own words.

Oh, that a sense of social justice would be enough. But for the stage, there also needs to be a powerful sense of theater.

There's no question that false conviction and ineptitude-to-malevolence in our justice system make for great drama, particularly when it stays close to real lives. Over the last decade or so, it's a subject that's been riveting on screen from documentary Brother's Keeper to bio film The Hurricane.

But between the sympathetic playwrights' tendency to erase any flaws these falsely accused may have and director D. Lynn Meyers' flattening too many of the stories into a nice, clean middle class mold, The Exonerated loses some of the punch it should have in 90 intermissionless minutes.

A lot of people will end up cheering because they like its politics and it clearly cares so much.

The cast of 10 is onstage when the audience arrives, each settled into a chair centered in a small square space that could be a mini-interrogation room. In other cirsumstances, and with a couple of more people, they could be a jury.

Their body language is wonderful, telegraphing boredom, anger, defeat.

They tell their stories: Delbert (William Jay Marshall) is a poet and philosopher who happened to be the wrong color when there was a murder in the neighborhood. Sunny (Tracy Shayne) somehow found herself in the middle of a cop killing.

The local D.A. had a grudge against Kerry (A. Jackson Ford) and managed to pin a murder on him with a fingerprint.

But Ford isn't convincing as a pretty, smalltown bad boy, and it's beyond belief that a man with the educated air embedded in him by Jim Nelson could be railroaded into offering a vision of how he might have killed his parents.

Too many of them seem so inappropriately suburban.

The cops and prosecutors, mostly played by Greg Procaccino and Michael Bath, are pretty much primetime stereotypes. They're playing what's written, but we've seen it so many times before it doesn't have any impact.

Some of the actors, Marshall in particular, are very good at getting inside the skin of their characters and that's what The Exonerated needs - for all the performers to be digging deeper rather than being satisfied with doing a reasonable job on the surface.

It's their job to let the audience feel and understand these people inside their stories, to know their humanity and then meet it with our own.

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The Exonerated, through Sept. 26, Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati, 1127 Vine St., Over-the-Rhine, 421-3555.