Teatro Vagon’s performance of Reginald Rose’s 1954 script depicts 12 male jurors deliberating over the guilt of a young man accused of killing his father in New York City. A guilty verdict means the death penalty for the 16-year-old boy from an impoverished slum.
Courtroom settings are always dramatic in that they portray conflict with opponents lining up on both sides with a great deal at stake.
Under David Acevedo’s direction, 11 of the jurors bitterly, offensively, derisively, and vengefully oppose the lone man who questions the prosecution’s story.
Steve Ortiz is powerful as the man who stands alone, gently, at first, reminding the men of their duty as instructed and introducing mild questions as to the veracity of the testimony. Juror #8 is Socratic in his cross-examination and exposure of the myth of the prosecution story.
Armando Rey, as #3, plays #8’s hardest opponent, emerging from a strong emotional center to condemn the accused. Ortiz and Rey are perfect contrasts with Ortiz cool and unflappable while Rey is hot and impetuous.
Marte Mejstrik plays #10, utterly uninterested in the individual facts, colloquial, sarcastic, and dismissive.
The play is an intense, suspenseful, embodied catalog of the rhetoric of argumentation offending and defending prejudice.
The play is post-modern in the sense that it exposes the prosecution’s narrative and the juror’s mechanical acceptance as a set of perceptions, edited memories of perceptions, informal fallacies, irrelevances, bigotries, and the desperately stubborn clinging to belief in the face of doubt. The play questions absolute truth and knowledge and in particular our eagerness to act in ignorance. It refuses the modern position that knowledge and its presumptive knowers are reliable.
12 Angry Men plays at the Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th Street (near York), San Francisco until January 28th, 2012. The theatre is about 10 minutes on foot from the 24th Street BART station and has many places to eat and drink.
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