How did Blank research for the play, The Exonerated?

The authors of The Exonerated interviewed many former death row prisoners and recorded hundreds of hours of audio tapes, which they then converted into typed transcripts. They also studied court transcripts and case files. As they write in the introduction to the play, "We spent countless hours in dusty courthouse record rooms, pawing through thousands of microfiche files and cardboard boxes full of affidavits, depositions, police interrogations, and courtroom testimony." Then they shaped and edited these voluminous and unwieldy documents into a ninety-minute play. Almost every word comes from the public record or from an interview the authors conducted. The result is a dramatic work that uses everyday language as spoken by real people, the stories of real people having been shaped by the dramatists into a theatrical form.