In the play Twelve Angry Men, there are surprisingly 13 cast members. In the current production of Twelve Angry Men that I am in, I play that 13th man. It is the role of the guard, and the part is basically a glorified prop. I bring in props throughout the piece to the rest of the cast and am on stage for a total of three minutes during the two-hour show. Because of that, I have had the opportunity to watch the play more times than I can count.
For those of you who don’t know the piece, it is the story of a jury placed on a murder trial. It is the trial of a 16-year-old boy accused of killing his father. The case is stacked against the boy, and all of the evidence from the trial points to him having done it. The entire jury feels that the boy is guilty, except for one man, who asks to talk about it a bit more. If the jury convicts the boy, then he would be sentenced to the electric chair. Slowly but surely, the one man is able to convince the rest that there is enough reasonable doubt to not convict the boy. After having seen the show so many times, here are my takeaways. While that short synopsis of the show I provided would sound accurate to most who have seen the play before, it is slightly inaccurate. I said that one man is able to convince the rest, when in reality, the first man really only convinces two or three others.
Many of the major points brought up throughout the show come from those who have changed sides—people who started out saying the boy was guilty, who now think he’s innocent. This is an important point because even the first man to not vote guilty isn’t doing so claiming that the boy is innocent. He just isn’t sure and wants to talk about it. As the others start to talk about it more, they discover doubts and questions that they had had inside themselves—things that they either thought about but didn’t feel were important enough to bring up, or things that they had once thought but were then covered up by new information that convinced them of the guilt. There are also those who come up with questions as the group continues talking.
The point is, it took more than one person; it took the whole group. On top of that, it took people being willing to question what they thought they were sure of. If the people in that room were not willing to consider a view outside of their own, they would have convicted the boy. None of them had bad intent in their hearts; they just had no reason to doubt what they were sure of. When we are offered the chance to reconsider things that we think are true, we should be willing to look past our own prejudices and ideas to honestly consider those things. While we likely won’t find ourselves in a jury surrounded by 11 others trying to send a 16-year-old boy to the electric chair, we will likely find ourselves in situations where others are sure of something, and we want to talk about it a little more. If we’re willing to ask those questions and open those conversations, there are a lot of things that we can find that we would not have found otherwise.