Newsletter – September 5, 2025
I was preparing to direct a stage version of Dead Man Walking in Wichita when Katrina hit the Gulf Coast.
The Death Penalty Discourse Center operated out of that area. Had they even received the check for the performance rights? I had no way of knowing, and they were unreachable. Louisiana was hit hard.
There was nowhere to go but forward.
Sister Helen Prejean’s bestselling memoir had been adapted into an Academy Award winning movie and, as a theatre professor working in a university founded by nuns, I knew this would be a significant opportunity. The hurricane turned many lives upside down and this play did the same.
I gathered a cast of very talented and dedicated actors who understood the gravity of this story and the questions of life and death. Even my eight-year-old daughter played an important role as the surviving sister of the murder victim. She delivered a haunting performance as the forgotten child, emotionally abandoned by her parents who were drowning in their own grief.
A local sister who ministered to prisoners on death row came to speak to the cast about “her men.” She told us moving stories of the men who lived daily with the regret of their deeds and their desire to make things right with the survivors, their consciences, and God. Her words transformed them from monsters into flawed human beings.
For the execution scene, the university choir recorded a moving rendition of “Amazing Grace” that played through the prisoner’s death and the removal of his body on the gurney. The audience didn’t know that the sweet tenor solo in the recording was sung by the actor playing the prisoner.
I have personal notes from several actors thanking me for the opportunity to live and feel the reality of their characters. One even described how she and the actors playing the parents of the murdered girl broke down in a group hug backstage, holding one another and weeping. She was thanking me for that experience.
My wife and I watched TV for weeks during Katrina recovery efforts, saddened by the mounting death toll.
Eventually the check did clear. Sister Helen and the members of The Death Penalty Discourse Center were among the survivors. I’m sure they were changed by the experience. I know we were.
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Eric Margerum 