The Twelve Angry Jurors

For one of my outside events I went to see the play “The Twelve Angry Jurors” put on by the University of Memphis Theatre department. I very much enjoyed the play, and thought that it was very well done. The play was about a murder trial where a boy is being convicted of killing his father. At the beginning, all the jurors except for one think that the boy is guilty. After continually discussing, the whole jury changes their opinion to not guilty. The idea of the story was very interesting, but I thought that the play was a little slow, and a little too long. They dragged out some part, and some things were very repetitive. The play made me put myself in the shoes of a juror. At the beginning of the case, I would have voted the boy guilty. After listening to all the arguments, I no longer believed that the boy killed his father. It really showed me how irrational we are at making decisions. A boy’s life was at stake, and almost every jury member didn’t think twice about putting up his or her hand. As human beings, we don’t analyze things deep enough. On the surface, the boy seemed guilty, but when dug deeper, it was pretty clear that he wasn’t. For example, when the old man who testified in court said that he saw the boy run out of his house everyone just assumed that was true. When they measured out the distance and timed him walking, it was very clear that it did not take the amount of time that he said, and in fact his statement was very false. As humans, I think that we may be too trusting. All humans make mistakes; it’s a part of whom we are. In this case, the jury can’t just believe that the man saw the boy run out of the stairwell, or believe the women saw the boy out of the window, we need to take in to account that humans make mistakes. I also enjoyed the different characters in this play. They were all very unique, and brought something different to the story. I thoroughly disliked the racist Southern lady. She made me very angry because she was so close-minded and so racist. Overall, this play was well worth my time, and showed me a lot about life and human nature.