NYT - Hard-Living Singer Gives Voice to the Executed (Steve Earle)

[DoYouEverWonder]

Steve Earle - Washington, DC - Sept 24, 2005


Published: October 22, 2005

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.

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.

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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.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/22/arts/music/22earl.html?pagewanted=1&adxnnl=0&8hpib&adxnnlx=1129982622-OCyp4VdDBx3FisrJTiQ8bA