One dozen angry folks - one room

By Nikolai Slywka

PATRICK MCGARVEY/YH Asher Price, TC'01, and Aaron Kogan, ES'00, restrain Manny Caixero, BR'00.

It's no wonder that the 1959 film version of Twelve Angry Men is used in corporate seminars on employee relations. This jury-room drama concisely exposes the biases, fears, and complacency that infect group decision-making. In his stage production of Twelve Angry Men, director Brian Fischkin, PC '98, faithfully retains the film's didactic appeal. In doing so, he provides an often compelling 55-minute play about the hard work it takes to be uncertain.

Twelve Angry Men follows a jury as it debates the guilt of an 18 year-old accused of killing his father in a New York City slum. At the start, the jury is one vote shy of the unanimous decision that will send the kid to the electric chair. The dissenting juror, played with skillful reserve by Eric Rodriguez, PC '00, doggedly argues that reasonable doubt exists. Amid a lot of disgruntled trips to the water pitcher, angry thumps on the table, and the stabbing of two switchblades into a table, the other jurors slowly begin to lose confidence in their belief that the accused is guilty.

As the prosecution's case unravels, the psychology allowing the jurors to ignore certain essential questions comes to light. The jury members' debate reveals not only the flawed logic of their initial decision to convict, but also the various prejudices and insecurities that underwrite this logic.

The play is staged on the floor of the Timothy Dwight dining hall, with the audience spread in a horseshoe around the jury table. The problem with this arrangement is that the dining hall, with its varnished wood paneling and soaring ceiling, is much too gracious a space for a play that is set in a civic building.

Manny Caixeiro, BR '00, does a wonderful job as the implacable proponent of a guilty verdict. He prowls around the jury room in a nearly constant pique, bullying his peers and launching spittle whenever he uses his gravelly voice, alternately infuriated and bewildered by the namby-pamby prolonging of what he sees as an open-and-shut case. He's the All-American Menace, sustained by a faith in bedrock values and his ability to kick your ass.

Toward the end of the play, Caixeiro's meaty neck gets particularly hot under its collar, and he accuses his fellow jurors of being a "lousy bunch of bleeding hearts." He's on the right track. It's not so much that his peers are bleeding hearts, but that the play's liberalism is lousily deployed. The play invokes liberalism here and there, and then abandons it for a depoliticized emphasis on the particulars of the case.

Early on, Rodriguez's character suggests that the accused's upbringing in a rough neighborhood might explain his purported violence. In other words, even if the accused did kill his father, some responsibility for the murder should be shifted to his slum environment. Rather than exploring the complexities of defending someone on the basis of cultural conditioning, the play takes the disappointingly safer route of an exoneration based on the exposure of faulty witnesses.

Given that Twelve Angry Men was written in 1955 and questions of environmental conditioning wouldn't be foregrounded in American politics until the '60s, it's uncharitable to fault Fischkin for not orienting his production in a wider social context. One can question, however, his use of a woman (Kristy Greenburg, CC '01) as the jury foreman (referred to as "Madame Foreman"). An unrepentantly macho character like the one played by Caixeiro should chafe at having a woman tell him when to speak and where to sit; but he never does. For a play so concerned with demonstrating the tensions of group interaction, the role that gender plays in these tensions is strangely not an issue.

Back to A&E...