From Feb. 6 to Feb. 9, a question of justice, ethics and innocence was at play in the hands of a collaborative production of “Twelve Angry Jurors.”
The play, held in UC Irvine’s charming Little Theatre, featured a full cast of 12 Metro Theatre Company students portraying jurors disputing the case of a teenager accused of murdering his father. When the lights dim, the props on stage come to life. The audience is no longer on the UC Irvine campus waiting for the show to start — they are in 1950s New York, awaiting the deliberation of the decade.
The cast files in, awkwardly standing by windows and drinking copious amounts of water from the prop water machine. They’re told that to leave, they must come up with a unanimous vote: guilty or not guilty. Nearly the entire jury is ready to leave as soon as they enter, hoping to escape the suffocating heat of a sweltering summer day. They almost unanimously agree to vote guilty — eager to get the trial over and done with — until Juror 8 (Jack Stoler) votes not guilty, leading the group into a flurry of anger, accusations and tears. In the end, the jury reaches a final unanimous verdict of not guilty.
The play was a three-part collaboration between Director DJ Maloney, Metro Theatre Company and Mock Trial at UC Irvine. Maloney, a second-year UCI graduate student in stage management, said “Twelve Angry Jurors” was both his producer and directorial debut.
“I pulled my favorite things from each director that I’ve worked with in the past — like, ‘Ooh, I like this style, I like this style, I wanna incorporate this,’” Maloney said in an interview with New University. “I felt it was like a culmination of all of my knowledge put together. And luckily, I had a great team, I had a great stage manager, I had a great assistant director and I really didn’t struggle at all with the directing side of it all.”
Maloney’s thoughtful supervision is present throughout the play. While the original “Twelve Angry Men” movie sports an all-male cast, Maloney’s production features both male-presenting and female-presenting jurors in “Twelve Angry Jurors.” Many mixed-gender productions have been staged before, but Maloney was particularly interested in how to divide the jurors along gender lines. They reread the script over and over to analyze where gender plays a role in the story.
“The way that it’s set up is, there were six jurors who voted for guilty, and the other six jurors voted not guilty. Those not guilty jurors — I wanted them all to be female because they are seeing the doubt,” Maloney said. “[The script] says, ‘if you’re planning on doing “Twelve Angry Jurors,” it might be smart to have Juror 3 and Juror 8 presented by male-identifying actors.’ And I knew that — I was like, ‘Nope, I’m not doing that.’”
In Maloney’s production, Juror 8, a female-presenting character, and Juror 3 (Brennan McMahon), a male-presenting character, take on the most prominent roles. Juror 8 is the dissenting vote, while Juror 3 leads the guilty vote. As the play progresses, a clear contrast emerges between the two.
Stoler’s calm, controlled demeanor commands the room, maintaining composure even with a switchblade in their face. McMahon, on the other hand, descends from obstinate exasperation into emotional outrage — at times rash and even terrifying as he threatens to kill Juror 8. This passionate display, which seems to come naturally to the actors as tension builds, was as carefully planned as the gendered casting. Maloney even used a volume meter to determine the key moments for Juror 3’s outbursts.
“[Juror 3 is] very smug at the beginning because he knows he’s got people on his side. And then Act Two — it’s that boiling pot of aggression because, at the end of Act Two, we see him use almost physical violence against another juror. And it’s that boiling we have to build,” Maloney said.
But as quickly as Juror 3’s anger rises, he is brought back down once more.
“The rest of Act Three for [Juror 3] is full [of] desperation, and so [he] is desperate to get more people on his side. You see it in his face — how he was trying to, and the script does it so well too — him trying to get more people on his side. Like, he’s able to get a few people to swap, but then Juror 8 swaps them right back.”
Maloney reminds audiences that “Twelve Angry Jurors” does not exist in a vacuum. It directly relates to the lives of real people and their struggles. Following each nightly performance, the cast hosted themed talk-back events discussing, as Maloney put it, “individual conviction in the face of groupthink”; “pride, guilt and doubt”; “racism, bias and bigotry”; and “the role that art has in social justice.”
Maloney said the fourth discussion, on art and social justice, was particularly illuminating for both cast and audience members, lasting nearly an hour.
“I think my biggest takeaway from those talk-backs [was] how we all agreed that, [as] artists, we don’t have a lot of time,” Maloney said. “We’re putting on these important plays that are a call to action in some senses. And we all agreed that we need to give more time to do that.”
While Jurors 8 and 3 played the most significant roles in driving the play’s narrative, Maloney recognized the social importance of many of the other jurors. Juror 4 (Davin Metcalf) represented the analytical perspective, acting as a buffer between the short-tempered Juror 3 and the composed Juror 8. Through Juror 4’s rational thought and reasonings — aptly portrayed by a stern Metcalf — Maloney highlighted the many moments of irony and foreshadowing as Juror 4 gradually changes their vote.
Juror 11 (Meghna Srikumar) was another compelling character. An immigrant from India who had moved to the United States, Juror 11 delivers a powerful monologue about the importance of listening to Juror 8 in the name of democracy and the right to a fair trial. Srikumar’s performance resonated deeply with audiences, pushing her to the forefront despite being a relatively shy character. Juror 11’s position as an immigrant guides her passion for American democracy, reminding viewers that these issues of democracy and the ability to challenge the majority are very real and pertinent to the American experience.
Maloney emphasized how Juror 9 (Megan January), the first to switch from guilty to not guilty, underscores Srikumar’s speech. The performance leaves audiences with maybe the most enduring line of the play:
“It takes a great deal of courage to stand alone.”
Corinna Chin is an Arts & Entertainment Staff Writer. She can be reached at corinnac@uci.edu.
Edited by Alaina Retodo and Jaheem Conley