KARLA

by Steve Earle

Directed by Bruce Kronenberg

Presented by Caney Creek Productions

Don’t miss KARLA, the riveting new play written by the legendary Grammy Award winning singer songwriter, Steve Earle. KARLA is a gripping portrait of Karla Faye Tucker, who was sentenced to death and executed in 1998 for a double homicide, making her the first woman executed in Texas since the Civil War. The play traces the events in Tucker’s life leading up to the murder and explores her “re-birth” into religion while serving over 14 years on Death Row. The cast of five includes Obie award-winning actress Jodie Markell as Karla.

Hard-Living Singer Gives Voice to the Executed

By BRUCE WEBER, NY Times

Steve Earle turned 50 this year, got married for the seventh time and moved from Nashville to New York City. It was one of two birthday presents to himself (the move, not the marriage). The other is surfing lessons, in Australia, at the end of this month.

All this came out in the first few minutes of a breakfast conversation with Mr. Earle, who is a former cocaine and heroin addict with an eighth-grade education and a prison record, and who has a hard time staying silent or still. Seven marriages is quite a few, he acknowledged, about his wedding over the summer to Allison Moorer, a singer who opened for him on a recent tour.

"But it's the first time I've ever been married sober," said Mr. Earle, who looks like someone who has only lately begun to take care of himself. He's not a slight man, but he has the thin, slightly hunched shoulders of someone who has lost a lot of weight, which he has. He wore a black T-shirt, saggy jeans and the antihip eyeglasses of a pharmacist or an accountant.

If his life has the contours of a country song - eventful, teary and redemptive - well, he is, of course, a country singer, though that's more of a convenient, rather than adequate, description of his music. His fat songbook resonates with the distinctive western twang of his native Texas, but it trespasses on many genres: country ballads, Irish folk dances, hard-rocking anthems, rhythm and blues, even a lullaby or two.

He is also a death-penalty opponent, a fiction writer, a radio host and, it turns out, a playwright. His play, "Karla," which was written in Nashville and produced there in 2002, began a 16-performance showcase, directed by Bruce Kronenburg, at the Culture Project at 45 Bleecker Street on Thursday, and runs through Nov. 13. Now in previews, it opens tomorrow.

The play is about Karla Faye Tucker, the murderer who in 1998 became the first woman executed by the State of Texas since the Civil War, in spite of an apparently sincere jailhouse conversion and a flood of opposition from abolitionists. ("It's pretentious, but that's what we call ourselves," said Mr. Earle, referring to his fellow death-penalty opponents.)

The play makes use of Tucker's biography and even her own words - including some taken from an interview with Larry King just weeks before her execution - but her trial, as presented in the play, is fictional and a little surreal, with Karla, played by Jody Markell, both addressing the audience and performing with four actors who portray her family members, friends and lovers, as well as her victims and the judge and jury.

The play argues the abolitionist view that "the death penalty diminishes all of us," as Mr. Earle put it, but unlike his songwriting, which has taken a distinct political turn in the past few years, it's more philosophical than polemical, more rueful than argumentative.

Indeed, it seems almost personal, bespeaking Mr. Earle's curiosity about, and sympathy for, the kind of character he evidently was himself - that is, someone of tainted decency and fouled potential. When he speaks about Tucker, it seems clear that he feels almost a kinship with her, and a kind of sorrow for the turn her life didn't take before it was too late.

He believes her born-again experience was real, he said, and though he himself is not a Christian, "or anything close to it," he does believe in God; he had his own awakening in Alcoholics Anonymous.

"I'm a recovering addict; I have to believe in a power greater than myself," he said. "I wrote the play thinking that at the end, when Karla leaves, she's going to Jesus."

But "Karla," he said, is not about religion or faith.

"The play's about forgiveness," Mr. Earle said, and his fans will recognize this as a theme in his songs. One, "Billy Austin," is a lament of a death-row prisoner; another, "John Walker's Blues," is a ballad written from the perspective of John Walker Lindh, the young American who joined the Taliban.

In the play, as in those songs, Mr. Earle isn't out to excuse grievous acts, which in Tucker's case were especially horrific. (She and her boyfriend, in a drug-induced frenzy, entered the home of a sleeping acquaintance and hacked him to death, along with the woman in his bed, with a pickax.) But Mr. Earle's instinct is the writerly, not the political, one, and the play, like many of his songs that tell stories, has the genuine mark of a curious man, someone who has imagined himself inside the head of another.

"My strong suit, the muscles I was born with as a writer, lend themselves much more to narrative than they do to poetics," said Mr. Earle, whose short-story collection, "Doghouse Roses," was published in 2001. He began writing - other than songs, that is - after his four-month stint in jail on a drug charge in 1994. He hadn't written a song in four years because serving his habit had become too time-consuming.

"I stated writing fiction as kind of an exercise," he said. "There wasn't always a melody lying around, and I was really paranoid about writer's block. I had never tried to write anything but songs because I thought, 'I have an eighth-grade education, so I can't write anything but songs,' but then I thought, 'the only reason I'm not totally ignorant is that I read a lot.' I wrote a story, and then another."

It was the songs "Billy Austin," written in 1990, and then "Ellis Unit One," written for the 1995 film "Dead Man Walking," that led Mr. Earle to the death penalty abolition movement. Inmates began writing to him; so did organizations like Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation. As part of his 12-step recovery plan, he began, as he put it, "doing real, live, hands-on activism, washing dishes and picking people up at the airport."

"Most of the people who talk about this issue, they don't know anybody on death row, but I do," said Mr. Earle, who witnessed the execution of one of his correspondents, Jonathan Nobles, in 1998 (and wrote a song, "Over Yonder," about him). "I've known a lot of them, and most of them are dead now. And none of my guys were innocent."

That, for Mr. Earle, is not the end of the drama, but the beginning. The play's tensest scenes are confrontations, set in purgatory, where Karla has to face her victims. Ms. Markell, who is from Memphis, said she was attracted to the part because Karla had an Every Southern Woman quality about her, and because Karla's spiritual conversion in prison struck her as both genuine and moving.

Still, the confrontation scenes were so graphic in literal detail that Ms. Markell said that when she first read the script, "I didn't see how I could even say these things, much less play them."

In life, Karla never allowed herself to own up to what she did, Mr. Earle said. She hid behind her conversion. But she would have gotten there, he said, if she hadn't been put to death. She wasn't given the time.

"I fully believe we executed a different woman from the one we convicted," he said.