playbill vip

When one thinks of truly challenging plays, I wouldn't assume that Twelve Angry Men (or Women, in this case) would rank high on your list. Most people generally find Shakespeare or the ancient classical plays challenging due to their complexity and inherent "foreignness." But this play, Twelve Angry Women, has a high level of difficulty due to its simplicity. 

All twelve jurors enter the stage together and they never leave again. In the movies, when a character isn't speaking, the camera simply pans away from that actor or actors and will come back to them again when they are involved in something "important." You can't do that onstage. Every one of these characters is part of the action, always, and offering something to the scene in some way. The challenge for an actor in a show like this is finding that importance, finding their voice and their action and how that assist the play itself. Lines are great, but it isn't always an indication of importance. 

Great acting is in reacting and characterization. Realizing a character fully, knowing who they are and where they came from can help an actor make intelligent and logical choices about their actions (by the same token, sometimes the best choice for the character is something unintelligent and illogical), giving them a sort of character map to follow so all of the options in the world are not reasonable options at all times. However, in this script, there is very little information about the characters given to the actors in the script, very little, and that can be intimidating. Because the actors do pretty much have all of the options in the world at their disposal and they have had to make very deliberate and specific decisions about who their character is and where they came from to dictate where they are going.

I asked the crew to create as real of an environment as possible. I wanted to match the realism provided by the actors, producing an all-around realistic experience. Almost everything you see and hear onstage was researched and designed by the students, from the paint colors to the bird calls and everything in between. Mirroring what you see onstage, the challenge is in the simplicity of production values. Getting things just right.

I am very proud to say this cast of young ladies have succeeded in doing just that. They have managed to wade through the scope of the human experience and pull out very concrete characters, characters with their own personal tics and habits, cadences and physicalities and embrace them for the entire length of this play. What I've been asking them to do is hard, and it's exhausting, but they have done it with such poise and willingness and determination. They've paid attention to detail and executed a setting with such detail and precision that you feel like you're in that jury room with them. Watching these young ladies develop as actors and crew members improve and grow has been a pure pleasure on my part.

Sit back and enjoy a truly wonderful production.

Ashley Beck Heimbrock, c/o 2006