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Twelve Angry Menby Reginald Rose, adapted by Sherman L. Sergel |
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 Left to right: Grant Buckler, Kevin Shipley, Josh Ginsberg, Steve Powell, Gene Lee, John Geddes, Richard Palimaka |
A 16-year-old has just stood trial for the fatal stabbing of his father. It looks like an open-and-shut case until one of the jurors begins opening the others' eyes to the facts.
Among the jurors are men who are sure of the defendant's guilt based on little more than his background, and men who are more concerned about getting back to their own lives than about his guilt or innocence. But there are also jurors who want to be sure of the facts, including one who escaped from a country where justice was rarely done and who reminds the others not to take it for granted, and one who simply cannot convict a man "without talking about it first."
As they discuss the case, it becomes clear that the supposed murderer—while he is clearly no saint—has not been well defended, and that a verdict of guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt" may be harder to justify than most of the jurors believed. And yet, the danger of a wrongful conviction must be weighed against the danger of releasing a killer who might kill again.
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"This TV play turned movie turned stage play pours all the traditional excitement of a courtroom drama into the jury-room adjacent, where it shows the tension to be even higher. A conventional trial drama offers us a series of one-on-one confrontations, with only the judge permitted to interrupt. Reginald Rose’s play gives us a dozen characters in non-stop interaction over a matter of, literally, life-and-death, enmities and alliances forming and re-forming, everyone’s thoughts and feelings in continual flux." - National Post |
Left to right: Martin Fobert, Damien Schaefer, Jason Bowen, Steve Powell, John Geddes, Richard Palimaka
Reginald Rose wrote Twelve Angry Men as a television play in 1954. Rose is said to have been inspired to write it after doing jury duty in a murder trial. He made it into a stage play the following year, and later into a movie, in which Henry Fonda played a starring role, and which was nominated for three Academy Awards (but lost to The Bridge on the River Kwai in all three categories).
Reginald Rose
Reginald Rose was born in New York in 1920. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II before starting to write for television in 1951. He sold his first teleplay, Bus to Nowhere, in 1950 to CBS.
Rose eventually wrote for all three major American networks. He created and wrote for an early 1960s crime series called The Defenders, and wrote episodes for other series including Studio One, where Twelve Angry Men originally aired, and an episode for The Twilight Zone.
He also wrote television movies, screenplays and a handful of plays, including The Porcelain Year, Black Monday and This Agony, This Triumph.
His work was known for dealing with controversial social and political issues. Rose died in 2002.