by Juno Spencer

As the fall season arrives, so does this year’s fall play, the classic Twelve Angry Jurors (originally titled Twelve Angry Men). Written by Reginald Rose, the play is a courtroom drama in which twelve jurors debate and deliberate on whether or not to convict a young boy of murder, thereby condemning the boy to the death penalty.

With a cast of returning student actors as well as incoming freshmen, viewers are sure to see new faces. But what difficulties came with the actual choice to do Twelve Angry Jurors? “We always want to rotate our fall play whether that be a murder mystery or comedy or whatever and it’d been a minute since we’d done a drama,” Ms. Breese, theatre director, said. “It was pretty easy to settle on 12 Angry Jurors for its timelessness and its ability to give kids a chance to do some character work.”

Casting presents tough decisions for directors. “We take a lot of things into consideration when it comes to auditions,” Breese said. “We’re never going to punish someone for being nervous or messing up, which is why we do cold reads to look for things like pacing, understanding the text, and ability to take direction as well as chemistry with other people.”

What sort of difficulties came from this process? “There are some tough characters in the show and we really had to make sure we were being mindful of people we thought could handle that,” Breese said. “We also had to really look at what characters interacted with each other. With us being a mixed cast you do have to have the consideration of gender in terms of ‘will she come off as a shrew’ or ‘will he just be seen as aggressive’ and really making sure we don’t lose sight of what the play is talking about.”