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?