Twelve Angry Men Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  ACT I

  ACT I

  Furniture and Property List

  Lighting Plot

  Effects Plot

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  TWELVE ANGRY MEN

  REGINALD ROSE (1920-2002) was born and grew up in New York City. After Pearl Harbor he enlisted, and served in the Philippines and Japan as a First Lieutenant until 1946. Writing since he was a teenager, he sold the first of his many television plays, The Bus to Nowhere, in 1950. He was cal ed for jury duty for the first time in 1954. It was a manslaughter case and the jury argued bitterly for eight hours before bringing in a unanimous verdict. He decided this was a powerful situation on which to base a television play, and wrote Twelve Angry Men as a live one-hour drama for CBS’s Studio One. Its impact led to the film version in 1957, and he received Oscar nominations for Best Screenplay and Best Picture (as coproducer). The stage version was first produced in 1964, and revised versions in 1996 and 2004. In 1997

  it was filmed for Showtime.

  Other TV plays include The Remarkable Incident at Carson Corners, Thunder on Sycamore Street, The Cruel Day, A Quiet Game of Cards, The Sacco-Vanzetti Story, Black Monday, Dear Friends, Studs Lonigan, The Rules of Marriage, and the award-winning Escape from Sobibor. Rose created, supervised, and wrote many of the episodes of the TV series The Defenders (1961-1965). His films include Crime in the Streets, Dino, Man of the West, The Man in the Net, Baxter! , Somebody Killed Her Husband, The Wild Geese, The Sea Wolves, and the film version of Whose Life Is It Anyway? He published Six Television Plays; The Thomas Book, written for children; and a memoir, Undelivered Mail.

  Nominated six times, he won Emmys in 1954, 1962, and 1963. Among his many awards are the Berlin Golden Bear (1957); Writers Guild of America awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award; and three Mystery Writers of America awards.

  DAVID MAMET is the author of the plays Oleanna, Glengarry Glen Ross (1984

  Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award), American Buffalo, A Life in the Theatre, Speed-the-Plow, Edmond, Lakeboat, The Water Engine, The Woods, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Reunion, The Cryptogram (1995 Obie Award), The Old Neighborhood, Boston Marriage, Dr. Faustus, and Romance. His translation and adaptations include Red River by Pierre Lavil e and The Cherry Orchard, Three Sisters, and Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov. His films include, as writer, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Verdict, The Untouchables, Hoffa, The Edge, Wag the Dog, and The Winslow Boy; as writer/director, House of Games, Oleanna, Homicide, The Spanish Prisoner, State and Main, Heist, and Spartan. He is also the author of Warm and Cold and Bar Mitzvah, books for children with il ustrations by Donald Sultan, and three other children’s books: Passover, The Duck and the Goat, and Henrietta; five volumes of essays: Writing in Restaurants, Some Freaks, The Cabin, Make-Believe Town, and Jaffsie and John Henry; two books of poems: The Hero Pony and Chinaman; Three Children’s Plays, On Directing Film, True and False, Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama, and the novels The Village, The Old Religion, and Wilson.

  Currently, he is cocreator of and executive producer for the CBS television series The Unit, for which he also writes and directs.

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  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

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  First published in the United States of America by Dramatic Publishing Co. 1955

  This edition with an introduction by David Mamet published in Penguin Books 2006

  Copyright © Reginald Rose, 1955, 1997

  Introduction copyright © David Mamet, 2006

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Rose, Reginald.

  Twelve angry men / Reginald Rose ; introduced by David Mamet.

  p. cm.—(Penguin classics)

  eISBN : 978-1-440-60029-6

  1. Legal drama, American. I. Title. II. Title: 12 angry men. III. Series.

  PS3535.O666T9 2006

  812’.54—dc22 2006046006

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  Introduction

  Our greatest American Philosopher, to my mind, was Eric Hoffer.

  He was an immigrant kid. He never spent a day in school. He roamed the country during the Depression as a hobo and migrant worker. He wrote that some fel ow from the Works Progress Administration rode into his hobo camp sometime in the thick of the Depression and said: “Who wants to work?” The volunteers were put on a flatbed truck and hauled some miles up into the mountains in California.

  The WPA boss gave one man a compass and a map and said: “Build a road. Your road is to start here, and in three months I wil meet you over there. Here are the specs. Take the tools off the truck and get to work.”

  Hoffer wrote that that is just what they did. There was enough talent and know-how on the truck, he wrote, to’ve built not only that road, but to have built America. For that, he said, was quite exactly how America was built—a group of reasonably intel igent workers took a simple plan, formed an ad-hoc group, and used their common sense and group spirit to execute it wel .

  There are, I think, two Americas. There is that which we decry on reading the newspapers. “Those fools,” we say, of the group not of our political bent, “how in the world can they believe the nonsense they are spouting? How can intel igent people act that way?” This is the America of “them.”

  And then there is the America we participate in—that fairly friendly and reasonable group of diverse interests and talents, happy to pitch in, the America of “us.” We see and participate in this group at the Little League, the Rotary, the Shul or Church, the block party, the sports bar—we speak its language in the conversation we strike up with the stranger in the airline departure lounge, in the chat with the other parents on the way to school, in the office jokes we share. This nonabstract, this real America, is a rather pleasant place. When we are not being actively divided—by religion or politics—we rest here in the default position of unity. Over time, we see, the reasonable often find a way to unite the seemingly irreconcilable claims of passion.

  This process is the essence of our system of jurisprudence. The jury trial enshrines our belief in and our experience that the multitude of the wise is the treasure of the land. Most people, I believe, initial y shun jury duty. The summons always seems to come at the least opportune time, and one might go kicking and screaming.

  Once
empaneled on the jury, however, one is subsumed by what one realizes is the essential component of American Democracy. On election day we vote, inwardly or openly maligning the other half of our society, those idiots who wil not see the light.

  In the jury room we are humbled by the realization that there is no one home but us.

  Here there are no hucksters, spending hundreds of milions on advertising, no stick figures throwing their jackets over their shoulder and grinning at the camera just like normal folks, no ginned-up controversies to enflame us against our neighbors.

  In the courtroom we see a poor man or woman—perhaps a criminal, perhaps a victim—caught in the awesome engine of the State, and we are told that, for the period of our service, we are the State.

  The lawyers can and wil lie, elaborate, attempt to distract, embelish, and confuse; and nothing stands between the person in the box and the horror of an unchecked government except twelve diverse, reasonably intel igent people.

  The jurors have been wrenched from their daily lives, and made to swear a terrible oath. This oath is of such strength that it makes that taken in the marriage ceremony seem—as indeed it may, sadly, general y prove—conditional.

  The Bible abounds with adjurations against perjury. A vast amount of the Book of Proverbs deals with the Lord’s horror of false witness. “Partiality in judging is not good. He who says to the wicked ‘you are innocent’ wil be cursed and abhorred.”

  “Witness not against your neighbor without cause,” “A false witness wil not go unpunished,” “Do not favor the rich in judgment neither give preference to the poor.”

  Sitting in the jury box we console ourselves for the loss of time and income, thinking, “Before God, that could be me on trial. If that were so, God forbid, I would want those in the jury to be as responsible as I pledge to be and as terrified of error as I am.”

  The jury is that same group of individuals who can, through divisive words, be congealed into a mob; who can, through persuasion or art, form itself into an audience. The audience suspends its disbelief in order to receive entertainment. As, curiously, does the mob—which is merely an audience enflamed, and moved by its righteous wrath, to crime. But the jury sets aside its prejudices, to aspire to the highest state of humanity: the capacity to use reason to overcome animal passion.

  They are instructed to apply the standard of “reasonable doubt.” Each member wil, of course, interpret this final y indefinable notion in his or her own way; and this is the genius of the jury trial, that these idiosyncratic understandings and applications of this abstract notion must each be defended to the group. The untutored, diverse group must then apply its own communal understanding of an abstract concept to a set of debatable facts and conflicting presentations, and arrive at a unanimous conclusion.

  Here the mega-state, outrageous in its multiplicity, absurd in the distance between manufacturer and end-user, between politician and voter, between entertainer and audience, is reduced to the size of a primitive clan.

  The drama this clan acts out is immemorial. The clan asks: “What shal we do with X?” And the elders reply: “Hold him here, while we retire and deliberate.”

  The protagonist of a drama is caught in circumstances not of his own making.

  The hero of a tragedy discovers, at the play’s dénouement, that the affective circumstances he thought external to himself were actual y brought into being by flaws in his own character.

  Tragedy is the more difficult form to write, as it is a closed system. The tragedy must resolve (both for the hero and for the viewer) in revelation that the answer was before them al the time. This revelation, then, must be both surprising and inevitable.

  Any attempt by the author to mitigate the inevitable closed progression toward knowledge wil weaken the tragedy. (The writer of the tragedy can not bring in conflicts and resolutions not brought into being by the hero’s character defects. He cannot advance the plot by whim.)

  The writer of the drama, on the other hand, has a wide license. He or she may introduce, at wil , external circumstances to beat the band: the hero may be assigned a physical il ness, a rotten set of parents, the antagonist of an evil government or employer, or a social y precarious status. As these states are not of the hero’s own device (they are merely assigned), the tools to be used in their vanquishment may be more or less arbitrary.

  Similarly, the very setting of the drama may be used for convenient effect. (Set Hamlet in a castle, a pawnshop, or a submarine, it’s the same play. The setting has no dramatic weight.)

  Writers of the drama, on the other hand, may, to provide a catalyst, moor or abandon their protagonists in that space the very egress from which provides dramatic fodder. (The proverbial example being the group of snowbound travelers stuck in the inn or its equivalent, e.g., Bus Stop, The Petrified Forest, Dead End, Truckline Café, The Waters of the Moon, and, to stretch a point, The Cherry Orchard.)

  These plays are al, genericaly, “gang dramas.”

  That is, formally, they do not differ from their (generaly coeval) counterparts on the comedy side, the films of the Marx Brothers. In the gang drama the protagonist or hero is split into many parts, each part (or character) standing for a different aspect of the hero’s consciousness.

  These warring factions (as the opposed factions of the consciousness in the individual) must work from their initial irreconcilable positions, to find unity where none could have been suspected. (They may be aided in the struggle if “snowbound at an inn,” as they have conveniently been provided with “no way out.”) At the end of the gang drama, the individuals (the play and, thus, the audience) have seen unity established and, so, are made more whole.

  In the bad version of this gang drama the audience is given the gift of a predictable ending: “Black people are people, too,” “Gay people are people, too,” “HIV-positive people are people, too.” This foreseeable, universal y accepted message is a sop to the self-esteem of the audience, which has been deprived of the experience of revelation. Self-congratulation sends the audience out into the night in a state of euphoria that wil not last past the end of the block. But the good drama (e.g., Twelve Angry Men) leaves the issue in doubt. It enmeshes the audience in the problems of the protagonists so that they may consider the arguments, now one, now the other, until, when hope is gone, persistence (of the author and of his or her creations) brings revelation, and the audience may leave the play surprised by the discovery of the possibility of peace.

  Cast

  Twelve Angry Men was produced on Broadway by The Roundabout Theatre Company: Todd Haimes, El en Richard, and Julia Levy. It opened at the American Airlines Theatre on October 28, 2004, with the fol owing cast: Directed by Scott El is

  Set designed by Al en Moyer

  Costumes designed by Michael Krass

  Lighting desing by Paul Palazzo

  Sound design by Brian Ronan

  Original compositions by John Gromada

  Characters

  1ST JUROR (FOREMAN)

  2ND JUROR

  3RD JUROR

  4TH JUROR

  5TH JUROR

  6TH JUROR

  7TH JUROR

  8TH JUROR

  9TH JUROR

  10TH JUROR

  11TH JUROR

  12TH JUROR

  GUARD

  JUDGE’S VOICE

  Setting—The jury room of a New York Court of Law Time—1957

  ACT I

  The jury room of a New York Court of Law, 1957. A very hot summer afternoon.

  It is a large, drab, bare room in need of painting, with three windows in the back wall through which can be seen the New York skyline. Off the jury room is a washroom with Washbasin, soap, and towels (visible on stage) and a lavatory beyond. A large, scarred table is center with twelve chairs around it. A bench stands against the wall and there are several extra chairs and a small table in the room, plus a watercooler, with paper cups and a wastebasket and an electric fan over the bench and a clock above the
cooler and row of hooks for coats, with a shelf over it. There are pencils, pads, and ashtrays on the table. At night the room is lit by fluorescent lighting with the switch next to the door.

  When the CURTAIN rises, the room is empty. The voice of the JUDGE is heard.

  JUDGE’S VOICE ... and that concludes the court’s explanation of the legal aspects of this case. And now, gentlemen of the jury, I come to my final instruction to you.

  Murder in the first degree—premeditated homicide—is the most serious charge tried in our criminal courts. You’ve listened to the testimony and you’ve had the law read to you and interpreted as it applies to this case. It now becomes your duty to try and separate the facts from the fancy. One man is dead. The life of another is at stake. I urge you to deliberate honestly and thoughtful y. If there is a reasonable doubt—then you must bring me a verdict of “not guilty.” If, however, there is no reasonable doubt—

  then you must, in good conscience, find the accused guilty. However you decide, your verdict must be unanimous. In the event you find the accused guilty, the bench wil not entertain a recommendation for mercy. The death sentence is mandatory in this case.

  The door opens and the GUARD enters. He carries a clipboard with a list of the jurors.

  I don’t envy you your job. You are faced with a grave responsibility. Thank you, gentlemen.

  There is a brief pause. Sound of JURORS walking, talking.

  GUARD: Al right, let’s move along, gentlemen.

  The JURORS enter.

  The GUARD checks his list.

  The 9TH JUROR , an old man, crosses, goes into the washroom, and exits to the lavatory.

  The 4TH JUROR begins to read a newspaper. Several JURORS open the windows.

  Others move awkwardly about the room. There is no conversation for a few moments. The 3RD JUROR takes out some notes and studies them. The 2ND

  JUROR crosses to the watercooler, and gets a cup of water. The FOREMAN tears a sheet from a notepad and tears up little slips of paper for ballots. The GUARD

  crosses to the 12TH JUROR and checks his name. The 7TH JUROR crosses to the 4TH JUROR and offers him a stick of gum. The 4TH JUROR shakes his head.