One Angry Actress

The Adobe Theater here in Albuquerque is putting on the classic play Twelve Angry Men , but they are keeping it all men. I intend to try and change that. I want to get a role in this show, so I intend to send this letter to them.

I write to you today in regards to your upcoming production of Twelve Angry Men. As both an actress and a first-year law student, I want to express my dismay that the Adobe Theater has missed a golden opportunity to fight gender inequality in both law and theater by committing to an all-male cast. If the Adobe Theater cast this play with both male and female actors, it would make a powerful, positive statement about the changing composition of both juries and stages.
Last fall two very important things happened to me: I caught the acting bug in a major way and also started law school. In the fall of 2008 I appeared as Alice in Closer at the Desert Rose Theater and in the first months of 2009 I appeared as Kathy in Vanities at the East Mountain Community Theater. When I saw the audition notice for Twelve Angry Men I got very excited, because this play would combine two huge presences in my life at this point. Law school has bored me, but theater has totally absorbed me. And here I saw a chance to see philosophies of law in action on the stage. Last semester I took criminal law and heard all about the arguments that come up in the play: that criminals must come from “bad environments,” that circumstantial evidence is dangerous, and that everyone has different definitions of “reasonable doubt.”
The play is called Twelve Angry Men, but let us examine exactly why. In 1955 when Reginald Rose wrote this play, only men could serve on juries. The American judicial system sadly did not consider women capable of deciding the fate of their fellow citizens. But according to my Civil Procedure professor Laura Gomez, women started appearing on juries in the 1970s, right around the time that women took hold of their forsaken rights in many other areas. The United States Constitution, the instrument that preserves most of our most sacred rights, includes many provisions related to the judicial system. But for much of our nation’s history, that judicial system closed itself to minorities of all kinds, including women.
And of course we see the same thing in the history of theater! It is common knowledge that women could not appear on the Elizabethan stages, and we now read another layer of humor into cross-dressing Shakespeare plays with male actors playing women dressing as men. Today women have taken their rightful places on stage and playwrights have obliged by creating some truly great roles for actresses.
One of the primary social functions of theater is to challenge the status quo. A great play and a great production can truly change people’s minds and maybe even lives. How many people came out of The Piano Lesson thinking differently about race, or came out of Cat On a Hot Tin Roof thinking differently about homosexuality, or Waiting for Godot thinking differently about the entire nature of existence? Twelve Angry Men is the kind of play that can truly make people think. With a boundary pushing, daring production, the play can take on even greater relevance and power. With a cast composed of both male and female actors, the theater can make a big statement: We have come a long way and we must keep going.
I completely respect the sanctity of the text. I majored in English in college and I know that we have only the words on the page and that these words are priceless. But I have read through the play and found very few references to gender. None of the jurors talk about their lives in a gendered way, and jurors refer to each other as “he” or “him” relatively infrequently. (In fact, by my count, Jurors 2, 7, and 12 never have a gender reference). You could of course change the pronouns to include female actors. But you don’t even have to do this! Keep the text exactly the same and have women playing males. That would make an even bigger statement of fighting the status quo and shaking up the theater world. One of the major themes of this play is that the audience does not know the backgrounds of these jurors. We must judge them only according to the words that come out of their mouths. Those words can come from either men or women.
I also of course understand that this is kind of a “period piece.” But the problems and issues that came up for a jury in 1955 still come up for juries in 2009, including the issue of capital punishment (upon which the New Mexico legislature will soon decide). We adapt Shakespeare and Chekhov to all kinds of settings, both in place and time, and use the timeless themes in those plays to comment upon our own time. Is there any reason not to do the same with Twelve Angry Men?
I hope the Adobe Theater will consider giving Albuquerque’s many fine actresses a chance to play a part in a groundbreaking, important work of theater and taking the opportunity to make a comment on the changing nature of society. We are fortunate here in Albuquerque to have an extremely diverse population from which to draw talent; in such a 12-person cast, the audience would expect racial and ethnic diversity, even though in a 1955 New York City jury, we would not have seen such racial and ethnic diversity. Let’s show the audience that juries have citizens from all walks of life, including women.

Sincerely,

Kristina Caffrey