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Program Notes:

Putting the Jury Center Stage

From Aeschylus’ Eumenides (458 BCE) to Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice to Law & Order, the court room drama has been a perennially popular genre. The emphasis has usually been on the trial itself and especially the arguments made by lawyers, to wit Aeschylus’ Apollo, Shakespeare’s Portia and Law & Order’s serial assistant district attorneys. But, in his original 1954 teleplay for Twelve Angry Men, Reginald Rose turned the focus from the courtroom to the jury’s deliberations after the trial, and to an examination of what actually influences the various members of the jury in forming their opinions on the case. The play was inspired by Rose’s own experience as a member of the jury in a manslaughter case in New York City. He wrote that his reluctance to serve his jury duty changed dramatically “the moment I walked into the courtroom…and found myself facing a strange man whose fate was suddenly more or less in my hands.” The “absolute finality” of the decision he and the other jurors would have to make, with the irreversible nature of the death penalty, impressed him with a sense of the tremendous responsibility the jury faced, and he decided that as no one outside that room could know what went on in the jury’s decision-making debates, “a play taking place entirely within a jury room might be an exciting and possibly moving experience for an audience.”

The 1950s are still widely considered the Golden Age of television drama, and Rose wrote the original teleplay for CBS’ Studio One in 1954. In those years television was rapidly replacing radio as the mainstay of home entertainment, so it was natural that Rose’s thoughts would turn to it as the medium for his drama. Studio One (which ran from 1948-1958) was one of the longest running and most popular of the live drama shows that were common at the time. It was shot out of New York, and featured young actors who were not yet known either on Broadway or in Hollywood – such as Charlton Heston, Jack Lemmon and Eva Marie Saint.

The story’s potential as a stage play, however, soon became clear, and Rose expanded the script from its original 50 minutes into a longer and more richly drawn script for the theatre in 1955, which was produced in 1964. In 1957 he and Henry Fonda co-produced a film version in which Fonda also starred as the civically-minded Juror Eight. The film, directed by Sidney Lumet, was an instant hit and was highly lauded; the New York Times review described the film as “a penetrating, sensitive and sometimes shocking dissection of the hearts and minds of men who obviously are something less than gods. It makes for taut, absorbing and compelling drama that reaches far beyond the close confines of its jury room setting.”

A multiple Emmy Award-winner, Rose continued to be preoccupied with social and political issues throughout his career, dealing with issues such as mob violence, social conformity, and racism, although the racial elements of his original screenplays, such as Thunder on Sycamore Street, were often edited out by studio executives worried they might alienate audience members. Despite his many later successes in television, film, and onstage, however, Twelve Angry Men remains Rose’s signature work. And as the recent Broadway revival made clear, it is one which (the period flavor of its 1950s characters and its all male jury notwithstanding) still resonates today. 

                                                                        --Elizabeth Williamson, Literary Manager