12 Angry Men: Drama Elements

In the play, "12 Angry Men" there are a lot of detailed stage directions. The stage directions add a lot of drama to the play and it gives you a better mental picture in your mind of how the scene would actually play out if you were to actually see it. However, I feel like some of the stage directions are really long and I found myself not wanting to read them because I wanted to get to the parts where the jurors were actually talking. There is one part where the foreman asks the guard for a diagram of the old man's house so that the jurors can test out if it was actually possible for the old man to reach his front door in 15 seconds from his bedroom door and the stage direction for that is a huge paragraph about how the guard brings in the diagram and what the diagram looks like which was SUPER unnecessary. I don't think the audience would need to know exactly what the diagram looks like as long as they say what they are testing out specifically. Some other stage directions were also unnecessary like when juror 7 is arguing with juror 11 and they put {angrily} in front of juror 7 saying "What do you mean, I don't understand it? Who do you think you are to talk to me like that?" A reader can obviously tell that he said that in an angry way because they were arguing and I'm sure a reader's mind would automatically read that sentence as if the juror was angry. Despite some of the unnecessary stage directions, there are a few that served their purpose very well. For example, when the stage directions are talking about the reactions of the other jurors when they are analyzing the evidence. Juror 8 says that "there is doubt, doubt doubt" and the stage directions say {Beats table with fist as he emphasizes word "doubt.'} I wouldn't have imagined juror 8 doing that in my mind so that stage direction provided a more detailed reaction of juror 8 and gave me a better mental image of his reaction. Do you think that the stage directions served a good purpose in this play or do you think that the play could have gone well without them?

Twelve Angry Men: Theme

There are many themes that are present throughout the play "Twelve Angry Men." The two main themes that I picked up on were Justice and Doubt. Throughout the play, there are many times that the jurors change their minds about the verdict. There are jurors that think that justice will not be served unless the boy is executed. However, juror #8 is the first to believe otherwise in thinking that the boy may not be guilty. The 8th juror proposes the idea that they should all take a vote and 10 vote "guilty" while one votes "guilty." This means that one of the jurors changed their vote from guilty to not guilty. Juror #9 admits to changing his vote and says that he wants to hear the arguments out. The group has another heated discussion and then they all take another vote. This time, 5th, 8th, 9th, and 11th vote "not guilty." They all keep going back and forth with their verdicts because they want to serve justice but there is a lot of doubts in their minds about what really happened in the murder case.

All of the jurors keep bringing up main points in the case can be doubted. For instance, there was an old man who claimed that he saw the boy running from his apartment after he killed his father. The old man had a stroke and walks very slowly but says that he saw the boy run down the stairs in 15 seconds. When they test this out, they conclude that this situation would be impossible and there's no way that the old man could have gotten to his door in 15 seconds. They also bring up the woman who said that she saw the murder through her window. The woman typically wears glasses and the jurors questioned whether or not she was wearing classes in bed when she said she witnessed this murder. If the jurors didn't sit there and analyze every piece of evidence that they had, they could send an innocent man to jail if they didn't analyze the situation properly. They also could let a guilty man walk free if they thought that just because this was a father/son relationship and the man was only 19 that he wouldn't do something like this.

Would you be able to be a juror? How would you handle having to look at every angle of an investigation?