The cast of Twelve Angry Men.
By Hap Erstein
The “golden age of television” of the 1950s produced many classic dramas that went on to further acclaim in other media.
Think of Requiem for a Heavyweight, or Marty, or The Miracle Worker. Certainly earning a spot on that list is Reginald Rose’s dramatized civics lesson, Twelve Angry Men, which the Maltz Jupiter Theatre has dusted off and given a vigorous mounting that makes clear the script has lost none of its relevance in the past half a century.
Of course it helps to have the services of two-time Tony Award winner Frank Galati (The Grapes of Wrath, Ragtime) and his hand-picked male ensemble to breathe life into the script. Not that they try to update the play or give it any contemporary spin. They simply commit themselves to the story of a jury asked to deliberate over a first-degree murder case and bring out the inherent tension and suspense in such an assignment.
After instructions by an offstage judge, 12 white men of various walks of life are locked into a sweltering, claustrophobic anteroom, charged with deciding whether a ghetto teen murdered his own father. Initially, the vote is 11-to-1 for conviction. The lone holdout, a soft-spoken architect known only as Juror No. 8, argues that he has reasonable doubt about the boy’s guilt.
As he calls on his fellow jurors to reconsider the evidence and testimony, tempers flare, prejudices are exposed, and pressure applied as the rest of the jury slowly moves toward his viewpoint. Rose deftly fills us in on the specifics of the case – without overloading us with exposition – as he expertly turns these 12 strangers into vivid individuals.
As Juror No. 8, the role that Henry Fonda played in the 1957 film, Patrick Clear consciously underplays without ever giving up control of the ongoing debate. Those most adamant for conviction are dealt the showier roles. Douglas Jones impresses as the most overly prejudiced juror and James Clarke is riveting as a father who cannot separate his conflict with his son from that of the victim and his alleged killer.
Big, splashy musicals will probably always be the Maltz Jupiter’s stock in trade, but when it can produce a drama as involving as Twelve Angry Men, they deserve to always be a part of the menu here.
TWELVE ANGRY MEN, Maltz Jupiter Theatre, 1001 E. Indiantown Road, Jupiter. Through Sunday. Tickets: $46-$53. Call: (561) 575-2223 or (800) 445-1666.
Trenell Mooring and David Nail in Cane.You have to admire the ambition of a program of commissioned scripts at Florida Stage known as The Florida Cycle.
Over the next several seasons, the West Palm Beach company hopes to premiere a diverse series of scripts set in the Sunshine State. And if they are as well-crafted and theatrical as the first act of Andrew Rosendorf’s new historical melodrama Cane, it will be time and effort well-spent. The problem, though, is that Rosendorf does not have a sufficiently satisfying second act to match his first.
Rosendorf, Florida Stage’s playwright-in-residence, kicks off the program – and the troupe’s first subscription season at the Kravis Center – with an epic tale that spans over 80 years, contrasting the surfeit of water at the time of the deadly 1928 hurricane with the dearth of water today.
He succeeds at framing the conservation issue with a compelling flesh-and-blood story, about a farmer-merchant who tries to buy the land of a cash-strapped World War I veteran, optimistically believing the purchase will guarantee his route to wealth. But the situation soon turns violent when the ex-soldier reneges on the deal.
Once we become emotionally invested in these characters, however, they are gone. The second act is set in present day and we meet the descendants of the earlier folks, a lot less interesting bunch of people. The problem is compounded because Rosendorf has not come up with particularly interesting things for them to do.
In fact, the most compelling writing in the second act is an extended monologue that relates what happened to a character’s great-grandmother during that killer 1928 ’cane. But those events are told to us, instead of being actively depicted.
In the first act, director Louis Tyrrell makes good use of his company’s new expansive, high-ceilinged digs, thanks largely to the scenic design by Richard Crowell, a craggy, steeply raked earthen floor that rises at the back to simulate the precarious mud dike of Lake Okeechobee. And the lighting skill of Suzanne M. Jones and her fierce lightning and waterless rain effect are as close as you are likely to come to a hurricane indoors.
The production has a solid five-member cast, each of whom plays a pair of characters, one in each act. Gregg Weiner, for instance, shows his versatility as a kindly, but overly ambitious store owner and, later, his great-grandson Junior, a sugar cane magnate eager to change crops and use his land to raise houses.
David Nail (seen last season in Sins of the Mother) is a worthy adversary as the apprehensive landowner and then a modern-day cop. Keep your eye on newcomer Trenell Mooring, who plays a taciturn pregnant teen in 1928 as well as her college-educated descendant, almost harnessing that unwieldy second-act monologue.
Rosendorf has a natural way with dialogue, giving his mostly uneducated characters a lyrical way of expressing himself. He seems like a playwright with a future, but with Cane he comes up short in the second act.
CANE, Florida Stage at the Kravis Center’s Rinker Playhouse, 701 Okeechobee Blvd., West Palm Beach. Through Sunday, Nov. 28. Tickets: $47-$50. Call: (561) 585-3433 or (800) 514-3837.