|
read stories about:
Jessica Blank '97:
|
Inspiration sometimes strikes in the most curious of places. For actor, writer and producer Jessica Blank '97, it was during a conference on the death penalty at Columbia University in early 2000. As she listened to an inmate recount his experiences in prison via a phone call patched in to the workshop, she knew immediately that she had a compelling story on her hands. A flurry of research, a proposal and a summer road trip to gather firsthand interviews from absolved ex-felons resulted in the play The Exonerated, which she co-wrote with her husband Erik Jensen.
The Exonerated, a documentary theater piece about innocent people on death row, was not only a Broadway sensation, it has been produced nationally and internationally; was transformed into a television drama starring Brian Dennehy, Susan Sarandon, Danny Glover and Aidan Quinn; and has been performed in front of the likes of Janet Reno, Supreme Court Justice David Souter and Sen. Patrick Leahy.
'Narrative is about empathy. The choice of who you ask your audience to empathize with is a political choice.' |
The experience was defining not just because of the impact the play made, but because it integrated Blank's interests in writing, acting, theater and activism for the first time. "Before Erik and I started working on The Exonerated, my writing, acting and activism were all separate tracks," she says. "With Exonerated, they started to coalesce and become one thing."
That one thing, she says, is storytelling. "Narrative is about empathy," says Blank. "You're asking your audience to empathize with the lead character. The choice of who you ask your audience to empathize with is a political choice."
 It was a cohesion that started to gel while she was at Macalester; Blank cites Professors Beth Cleary and Karen Warren as having had an enormous impact on her thinking. "My concept of my relationship to the larger world and what I thought about the world politically as an adult really started at Mac."
Blank, who grew up in Washington, D.C., attended Macalester from 1993 through 1995, then took a year off to work and travel. She spent a semester at Evergreen State College in Washington state, then returned to the Twin Cities to finish her undergraduate degree at the University of Minnesota. There she designed her own major fusing acting, writing and critical theory/cultural studies in an interdisciplinary focus.
After finishing college, Blank settled in New York in 1999 and enrolled in a two-year acting program at the William Esper Studio, where she met Jensen. Ever since, she's been telling her stories as an actor in various film, theater and television roles; as a playwright and screenwriter; as co-artistic director of a new theater company, The Fire Department; and as a writer, with a book published about the making of The Exonerated and a novel due out next year.
"The different things I do fit together--they're all storytelling," she says. "Somehow I've made this weird career for myself where that's what I get to do for a living. That's pretty cool."
Jenny Sherman '98
|
