The jury's back in with 'Twelve Angry Men' revival

It might not sound like a surefire formula for a Broadway hit: Take a 50-year-old teleplay about a jury deciding whether to impose an automatic death sentence on a 16-year-old delinquent accused of stabbing his father. Serve it up plain and unadorned: no topical updating, no splashy theatrics.

And yet, in its 32-week run at New York's Roundabout Theatre in 2004-05, "Twelve Angry Men" garnered glowing reviews, avid audiences, and three Tony nominations. Now, with a fresh cast led by Richard Thomas (of "Waltons" fame) and George Wendt ("Cheers"), the show is poised to alight Tuesday at the Colonial Theatre, the fifth stop in a 15-city, nine-month tour.

Director Scott Ellis, reached by phone amid a tech rehearsal for the Broadway production of "The Little Dog Laughed," says the idea for the revival actually came from Huntington Theatre artistic director Nicholas Martin: "We were vacationing in Provincetown, and Nicky mentioned that he'd seen a community production and was surprised how well it worked."

Ellis got hold of the standard adaptation but found it "really bad," he says. Recalling that Harold Pinter directed a successful London production in 1966, with input from the author, Reginald Rose (who died in 2002), Ellis tracked down that working script. "It's still Reginald's," Ellis notes, "but there had to be some guidance. If Harold Pinter was working on a script that I wrote, I would love to read his notes!"

Best known from the 1957 Sidney Lumet film, "Twelve Angry Men" depicts a Whitman's Sampler of "types" whose members stay locked in a jury room, heatedly debating the case, detail by detail. The verdict would seem to be a slam-dunk, but for some barely perceptible discrepancies noted by one juror.

Ellis assembled a crack Broadway cast, but not all the actors could later commit to a lengthy tour. He toyed with the idea of retaining some members but decided to start from scratch: "I felt that these 12 guys had to experience what it was like to be these people who are coming into a group. To do this play, they must work as a team."

Wendt, reached on the road in Baltimore, enthuses that "It's like playing ball every night with the A team." Wendt hadn't toured since his Second City days in the early '70s, but he's finding that his admiration for the play more than compensates for the rigors of the road. "The piece works, what can I tell you?" he says.

His role -- that of jury foreman -- is actually one of the least flashy: no dramatic outbursts, no shocking revelations of character. Sure, his fame would seem to ensure him a choice of leading roles, but "that's not really my style," he says. "I'd rather be part of the ensemble. And I'm happy with my guy's situation. He really has less of an agenda than some of the other characters. My job is to keep things moving and keep the warring factions from throttling each other."

Before they even started running lines, the cast members spent a week thrashing out precisely what their characters would have seen and heard during the three-day trial -- in essence, creating a phantom back script.

"Scott felt it was really important that we were all crystal-clear what went down," says Wendt. "There were oodles of facts that came up."

Another unusual exercise Ellis introduced in rehearsal was to have the actors, as they spoke their lines, approach and retreat from a line drawn across the floor, as one juror after another was swayed by the evidence and reconsidered the verdict. Says Wendt: "We each had our own little process of what moved us closer to flipping."

The instigator of all this vacillation is juror No. 8, whom Thomas has chosen to play not as an earnest crusader (Henry Fonda's approach in the Lumet film), but as a "very reluctant" lone voice.

"For him to raise his hand is very, very hard," Thomas says by phone. "I think he wishes he hadn't fallen into the situation at all. And he doesn't come from a particular place that guarantees a certain point of view, you know? He's very open. He's just about 'All right, let's have a conversation.' "

That openness, Thomas says, is the whole point of the holdout's character -- "except, one, you don't want him to be bland, and, two, you don't want people to think that he's just a walking set of ideas. The last thing I would want would be to approach this as John-Boy doing another good deed! I should not be wearing shining armor when I walk onstage."

In the tour's premiere in New Haven two months ago , Thomas's recessive twist on the role really opened up the play: Without Juror No. 8 as the primary focal point, the intricate interpersonal exchanges and the broader implications of the legal wrangling captured more attention. The trial process may have evolved in the past half-century (you won't find many all-white-male juries nowadays), but the issues the play addresses seemed timelier than ever.

Rose was writing, Thomas points out, during the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings: "It's about one person who raises his hand and says no. And he can't be squashed and he can't be silenced and he can't be blacklisted." At the time, Thomas adds, "people had to be really careful what they wrote. I think Rose was speaking in a sideways manner: He packed a great deal about dissent into this play, without actually naming it."

Thomas views "Twelve Angry Men" as "the democratic process writ large. It's also a play about the fact that the majority might be wrong! And that in a society where the majority rules, it's particularly important to pay attention to a dissenting voice."

Wendt sees parallels in the current incursions on constitutional protections, specifically the suspension of habeas corpus.

"I don't want to spoil the fun," he says, "but I'm sure that audiences are going to make some very strong connections to today's environment, because in one sense the play is about the rights of the accused -- enough said."

Asked whether he anticipated the play's current relevance, Ellis demurs: "I wish I were smarter than that, so I could say yes. But I did realize, watching it, that we're in a state in our country now where everything is so black and white: There's good and there's evil, and there's nothing in between. And you know what? This is all about the gray area."