On the strength of rave reviews and nightly standing ovations, Palm Beach Dramaworks is extending the run of Reginald Rose’s classic Twelve Angry Men. Three performances have been added, with the possibility of more. The new dates are Wednesday, December 28 at 2:00pm and 7:30pm, and Thursday, December 29 at 7:30pm. Tickets for all remaining performances are $84.00.

Phil Rosenzweig was a business school student at UCLA in the late 1970s when he saw 12 Angry Men for the first time. The film was screened in his organizational behavior class and was followed by a discussion. “I found the movie riveting,” says Rosenzweig. “I later learned that my professor wasn’t the only one using it in class; in fact, it was kind of a staple at business schools. It says so much about group dynamics and interpersonal behavior. When I became a business school professor, I began using it as well. And then I discovered that the legal profession thinks it’s their movie. There are any number of lawyers who were inspired by the movie, and they’re surprised to learn that it has such a big following in management and leadership. It’s really a remarkable work.”

In 2021, more than 40 years after Rosenzweig’s initial viewing of the film, Fordham University Press published his enlightening Reginald Rose and the Journey of 12 Angry Men. “Initially I thought I would write a short monograph to talk about how a drama can be looked at from a few different angles: the legal perspective, the group dynamics perspective, and so forth,” he says. “But then I became very interested in the making of the movie, and as I learned more about that, and about its beginnings as a television show, I also became interested in the writer. People think 12 Angry Men is either a Henry Fonda movie directed by Sidney Lumet, or a Sidney Lumet movie starring Henry Fonda. But really, the movie is Reginald Rose.”

Born in 1920, Rose was a native New Yorker who began writing seriously when he was 10 years old. He kept at it through high school, through his only year in college, and through a variety of jobs that didn’t much interest him, submitting short stories to magazines and receiving rejection slips in return. When he was 21, he enlisted in the army following the attack on Pearl Harbor. By the time Rose was discharged four years later, he was a first lieutenant. He went to work at Warner Bros., where he’d been employed prior to his stint in the army, and after a few years moved on to an advertising firm. All during this time, he continued to pursue a career as a fiction writer. By 1951, Rosenzweig writes, “he estimated that he had penned more than one hundred short stories, several plays, and the first half of three novels,” without selling any.

So, he decided to try television. It was a young medium still finding its way, and Rose, unimpressed with the programs he saw, figured he could do better. He sold his first script, “The Bus to Nowhere,” to a science fiction anthology series called Out There. After writing five adaptations for CBS’s prestigious Studio One in 1952 and 1953, he was offered the chance to write original plays for the show. And he had a cause: social justice.

“He and Rod Serling were trying to bring social issues to a broad audience,” says Rosenzweig. “Rose wanted to use this growing, mass medium to elevate, to inform, to get people to think and talk. He had witnessed racism in the army, and what he saw bothered him. When he had the opportunity to write these hour-long dramas for CBS, he gravitated to stories with a very strong element of social justice. They were also good dramas. He launched his career while working at an ad agency, married with two small kids [there would be six sons in all: four with his first wife, two with his second], and no money in the bank. That was a testimony to his vision and his tenacity. His oldest son, Jonathan, told me that Rose was unstinting and determined to make it as a writer without compromising his desire to bring important issues to public attention.”

He finally felt confident enough to quit his day job in 1954, after his first two efforts, The Remarkable Incident at Carson Corners (about individual responsibility and collective guilt) and Thunder on Sycamore Street (prejudice), received both critical acclaim and public accolades. 12 Angry Men, his fourth original teleplay, opened Studio One’s 1954-55 season and was inspired by a summons for jury duty. He told writer Denis Hamill, in an interview for the New York Daily News, that he looked around the courtroom and thought, “Wow, what a setting for a drama.”

In Six Television Plays, an anthology of some of his finest work including 12 Angry Men, Rose wrote, “No one anywhere ever knows what goes on inside a jury room but the jurors, and I thought then that a play taking place entirely within a jury room might be an exciting and possibly moving experience for an audience.”

In Rose’s jury room, 12 men deliberate the fate of a teenager accused of killing his father, and all but Juror 8 (played on TV by Robert Cummings) are certain of the young man’s guilt. As the lone holdout compels the others to carefully examine the evidence, the prejudices and social attitudes of each man are revealed – as are the strengths and flaws of the American jury system. (Note that the teleplay and film use the numeral in the title, while the play spells out the word Twelve.)

The Studio One broadcast of 12 Angry Men

“One of the things that I found really interesting in the writing of the teleplay is that in the first draft, Juror 8 is the source of all the insights,” says Rosenzweig. “Over time, as Rose revised the script, he backed off and gave more of the insights to different people who were initially shy and reticent. In the final version, they speak up more and more over the course of the drama and come up with really important insights. So, part of what Juror 8 is doing is making the environment safe for people who might have felt intimidated or marginalized, allowing them to participate more fully. That’s what a leader does in a group setting: he or she creates the mood and instills confidence in others, so that they can offer their thoughts. It was a brilliant idea.”

The 48-minute teleplay, broadcast live, received very strong reviews – Rose would go on to win his first Emmy Award – and CBS was soon fielding requests for copies of the script from theatre groups. Rose’s agent sold the domestic stage rights to Dramatic Publishing Company. In 1955, Rose received a phone call from Henry Fonda asking if he’d like to turn the piece into a film. They agreed to coproduce it, with Fonda as Juror 8. For the 90-minute screenplay, Rose fleshed out the characters, restored sections that he’d cut from the teleplay, and added new material. The director was Sidney Lumet, a seasoned television director (he had previously worked with Rose three times) who, like Rose, was making his film debut.

The movie premiered in 1957, and it, too, received raves. But it flopped at the box office, gone from first-run theatres in about a month. “I think there were two reasons that happened,” says Rosenzweig. “When television began taking away business from movies, Hollywood responded with big, widescreen, color productions – things that you can’t do on a small screen. 12 Angry Men was a sort of downbeat, black-and-white movie, set in one room, and it got lost in the shuffle. It was also cursed by the fact that United Artists, which was responsible for distribution, wanted to give it a national release and executives at Loew’s, the large theatre chain, liked what they saw and wanted to book it in their really big movie houses: 12 Angry Men premiered at the Capitol in New York City [with a seating capacity of 4,400]. When you premiere in a place like that and don’t fill the theatre quickly, you’re out. Fonda said later that he’d wished for the kind of opening that Marty [another small, black-and-white film] had two years earlier. In New York, it played at the Sutton, an art house on the East Side. And because the capacity was smaller, it could run longer and build word of mouth. But with a national release in big cinemas, 12 Angry Men closed in city after city; it never really had a chance to find its audience. In Europe, by contrast, they didn’t have these big, color, widescreen houses and – I’m going to generalize a little –the European taste in the 1950s was a little more amenable to thoughtful, small screen, dramatic pieces. So, 12 Angry Men did very well over there.”

Back home, 12 Angry Men should have faded into obscurity. But it didn’t. In the 1960s, it started showing up on television – quite a bit – and for many people around the country, it was their first exposure to the film. It was also in the ’60s that the movie became a staple in law schools and business schools. Its reputation continued to grow, and the film is perhaps more popular now than ever before. When, in 1998, the American Film Institute (AFI) put out its first list of the 100 Greatest American Films, 12 Angry Men was nowhere to be found. When the AFI issued a new list in 2007, 12 Angry Men was ranked eighty-seventh. On IMDb’s (Internet Movie Database) list of the top 250 movies, as determined by regular voters on the site, 12 Angry Men is currently ranked fifth.

And that’s just the movie. The play is a favorite across the country and around the world. After Dramatic bought the rights, the publisher’s son wrote a stage adaptation based on the teleplay. It was immediately embraced by amateur drama groups, and in the early ’60s was performed at some quality regional theatres. But, says Rosenzweig, the script wasn’t very good. “The writer changed a bunch of things, replacing subtlety with explanations, adding lines that actually weakened the play, and generally slowing things down.”

Looking back, it seems shocking that Rose let the rights get away. But Rosenzweig says that, given the time, it’s understandable. “This was the early days of television. Most dramas were performed once and never seen again. They weren’t filmed; they were just gone. Now – and I’m speculating – you’ve got an agent telling you, ‘Dramatic Publishing would like to buy the rights.’ And you say, ‘Sure, let’s sell them the rights.’ It seems pretty clear that nobody understood the value of the property.”

Rose was very unhappy with the Dramatic version. Fortunately, Dramatic did not own the international rights. “When [British actor] Leo Genn wanted to bring Twelve Angry Men to the stage in London, Rose said, ‘Great. You are not bound by the Dramatic version, so I’ll write you a version that’s much closer to the movie,’” says Rosenzweig. “That version was published by Samuel French, and it became the basis for the 2004 Broadway production,” the same script being used by PBD. (Samuel French, now part of Concord Theatricals, bought the US professional rights, while Dramatic retains the amateur rights.)

Due to the enormous impact of Twelve Angry Men on both stage and screen, Rose’s other accomplishments are frequently overlooked. His preferred medium was television, and throughout the 1950s he continued to tackle such provocative subjects as juvenile delinquency, dysfunctional families, vigilantism, and torture. But TV was changing. “By 1960, television was becoming quite dumbed down and appealing to the lowest common denominator,” says Rosenzweig. “At CBS [Chairman of the Board] William Paley was looking for shows that would speak to a more intelligent audience.”

“He was so hands-on that some writers objected,” says Rosenzweig. “He really oversaw the entire process. I’ve seen drafts of scripts, and you can see Rose’s handwriting all over them. He did a lot of rewriting, even though he didn’t necessarily get credit. The Defenders was very thoughtful television, highly regarded, and dealt with such topics as capital punishment, insanity defense, abortion, pornography, and mercy killing. Rose worked very hard on the series for three years, but in the middle of 1963 he had some health issues, his marriage broke down, and he pretty much stepped away from the show. For the last two years he had much less to do with The Defenders.”

Following The Defenders, Rose worked less frequently and had only sporadic success, most notably the mini-series Studs Lonigan (1979) and the film adaptation of Brian Clark’s play Whose Life Is It Anyway? (1981). “He made quite a bit of money with The Defenders, and he had worked really hard for 15 years,” says Rosenzweig. “He remarried, and I think he was ready to shift gears. He could pick his spots. On the other hand, he proposed a number of series and they were not picked up. He put a lot of time and effort into them, but people’s tastes had changed. He had been a fresh, new voice in 1953, but by the mid-’60s he was not a new voice anymore. He got very excited when Studs Lonigan came along, and he was very satisfied with that piece. And he continued to work until late in his life.”

Rose had long hoped to see Twelve Angry Men on a Broadway stage, but he died in 2002, two years before his dream became a reality. Sixty-eight years after the teleplay was first beamed into people’s living rooms, Twelve Angry Men retains all its potency. “It’s of its time, but it’s also timeless,” says Rosenzweig. “Rose created a really riveting drama that speaks to two distinct fields in ways that are very important. As a member of the audience, you can just go and have a terrific evening of theatre, or you can enjoy it on many different levels. I think that’s what makes it an extraordinary drama. And it says a lot about somebody who was not first and foremost a theatre writer. He was a television writer and screenwriter, but he gave us a classic, enduring American stage drama.”

Race, the Justice System, and Twelve Angry Men

What is the likelihood that 11 jurors would walk into a jury room ready to convict a teenager for murder, and emerge 90 minutes later with a verdict of not guilty? The answer is close to zero – if not zero. Reginald Rose’s Twelve Angry Men is a great drama that illuminates the strengths and flaws of the American jury system, including the way that personal biases, attitudes, and the dynamics among the jurors can impact the outcome of a case. Still, it’s more than improbable that all 11 would have a change of heart, particularly given the makeup of the jury: 12 White men.

To be clear, even with a more representative jury it remains highly unlikely that 11 people would do a 180. But there is considerable research substantiating that diverse juries make better decisions – which actually seems to be something Rose instinctively understood. When he wrote the teleplay for Studio One in 1954, women and people of color were permitted to serve on juries in New York. But jury pools were overwhelmingly made up of White men, and subsequently so were juries. Rose very deliberately made the choice of an all-White, male jury, in part because he felt the men would be uninhibited about expressing their prejudices to other White men.

Rose never reveals to the audience the race or ethnicity of the 16-year-old on trial for killing his father. All we’re told is that he lives in a slum and is one of “those people.” And we now know for certain that “those people” get fairer trials when the jury is heterogeneous.

That is precisely why PBD’s production, which, like the teleplay, is set in 1954, features an all-White, male cast. Producing Artistic Director William Hayes and director J. Barry Lewis believe that the makeup of the jury serves to underscore the fervid battle for gender and racial equality in America in 2022, and illustrate how far the country has and hasn’t traveled in the 68 years since the teleplay premiered.

In 2006, Sommers did a mock jury experiment and published his findings in a paper called “On racial diversity and group decision making: Identifying multiple effects of racial composition on jury deliberations.” He was motivated to do the study, he says, “because there were these high-profile cases, and people were speculating about the role that race and ethnicity played in juries. As a scientist, I wanted to try to look at the empirical question of how these things influence the process in the real world.”

Here's how it worked. “In the midst of their actual jury service, we recruited about 30 six-person juries and showed all of them the trial of a Black defendant charged with sexual assault,” says Sommers. “We manipulated the racial composition of these mock juries so that half of them were all-White and half of them were racially diverse, which, for the purposes of this study, meant four White and two Black jurors. The reason we didn’t have an even split or a predominantly Black jury is because of who was available to us. And I want to add that this isn’t the only kind of diversity we care about. Obviously, race and ethnicity is not an either/or, White/Black issue. Anyway, they watched the trial, we read them jury instructions, we turned on a video camera and let them deliberate.

“The main thing we found was that the deliberations of the juries were different between the diverse and the homogeneous groups,” Sommers continues. “The racially diverse juries raised a broader range of facts in discussing the case, and had wider-ranging deliberations. They were more likely to correct each other when factual inaccuracies came up, and more willing than all-White juries to discuss race and racism and racial profiling when those issues came up. So, you can argue that racially diverse juries are more thorough and more accurate and more willing to discuss a range of perspectives. And I think we would all agree that’s what we want juries to do.”

For the most part, Sommers was not surprised by the result, as it stands to reason that the more varied any kind of group is – not just by race and ethnicity, but by gender and sexual orientation – the more varied their perspectives will be. But, he says, “the big surprise was that even the White jurors behaved differently in diverse versus non-diverse settings.”

Sommers’ findings were reinforced by a 2012 Duke University study that examined “the impact of jury racial composition on trial outcomes using a data set of felony trials in Florida between 2000 and 2010.” In an article titled “The Impact of Jury Race in Criminal Trials,” the researchers found that “juries formed from all-White jury pools convict Black defendants significantly (16 percentage points) more often than White defendants, and [that] this gap in conviction rates is entirely eliminated when the jury pool includes at least one Black member. . . . These findings imply that the application of justice is highly uneven and raise obvious concerns about the fairness of trials in jurisdictions with a small proportion of Blacks in the jury pool.”

In 1986, 20 years before Sommers’ study, the Supreme Court ruled that a lawyer can’t challenge prospective jurors on the basis of their race or gender. But Sommers feels it’s had little effect on the racial composition of juries. “It’s usually not all that hard for attorneys to come up with race-neutral justifications for why they challenged someone. And even before you get to the courthouse, there are other factors that come into play. States get their jury pool lists from all different places; some use voter registration, some use driver's licenses or utility bills. When you do that, you wind up under-sampling certain populations: people who move a lot, people who don't drive, people who are less likely to vote. So, those who show up are not representative of the community. There are still a lot of examples of juries that are whiter and less diverse than the areas they represent.”

Exacerbating the problem today, says Sommers, is that hateful language has become mainstreamed, hate crimes continue to rise, and those that harbor this hatred can infiltrate the jury pool. “Look at the increase in anti-Semitism, homophobia, and all different kinds of racism in the last five years in this country. It’s shocking. At some level, the best part of the jury system is that there's a human element that represents the community. But when substantial segments of society are espousing hate and bigotry, of course those things will find their way into the courthouse. And there’s a long history – decades, centuries – of this kind of racism in our courthouses to begin with. Now you’re bringing people into court to serve as jurors who harbor these kinds of biases. If someone admits to their prejudices during jury selection, they won’t get seated on that jury. But sometimes these biases are less conscious. And sometimes people just don't want to share them.”

Sommers believes that the way to move toward a more representative, open-minded jury starts outside the courthouse. “It would certainly be nice if we could return to or at least move in the direction of an era of mutual respect, of valuing different perspectives,” he says. “We seemed to be headed there not that long ago, but we’ve taken a U-turn. On some level, Twelve Angry Men upholds that ideal. No one comes to blows at the end, everyone walks out of the courthouse in one piece, and they are able to disagree – for the most part, respectfully. I think that appeals to the audience in this day and age, although it may seem like a bygone era.

“There’s a lot that Rose got right in the play, aside from telling a great story,” Sommers continues. “A jury is such a strange phenomenon. Twelve strangers are brought together to interact in an incredibly intense fashion for a brief period of time, and they have to agree unanimously. Then they go their separate ways and probably will never see each other again. Where else do you see that? It's a unique kind of group and I think that's what fascinates people about it. The play and the movie get a lot of that right. It shows the US jury system at its best – not the all-White men part; that’s not the system at its best. But it does show people from different walks of life deliberating, and they give the defendant a fair shot. They sort things out and probably come to the right decision in the end. It doesn't always happen that way in real life, but it does at least show our aspirations for the jury system.”

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