November 2010

by Mary Beth Dagg

“Prejudice always obscures the truth.” That’s the quote you’ll see on T-shirts at West Seattle High School and the core message of the drama they bring to the stage November 5th.
From Nov. 4-13, the high school’s Drama Club presents 12 Angry People, an hour-long adaptation of Reginald Rose’s 1954 Teleplay, 12 Angry Men. The 1957 full-length movie starring Henry Fonda fully established the story as a classic.

This provocative jury-room drama takes place on a stifling hot day in New York City in what seems to be an open-and-shut case. We are flies on the wall as a jury deliberates the fate of a minority defendant in a first-degree murder trial. The stakes couldn’t be higher. Will this group of strangers send a boy to the electric chair for murdering his father?

Andrew Finley, director and WSHS Drama chair, says, “It’s a character study. What happens to a group of 12 disparate strangers when you lock them in the room and the only way out is consensus?”

Humans love anniversaries—birthdays and weddings particularly. There is something special about coming of age at 21 or reaching the first wedding anniversary—that is if marriage was chosen as an option. But there are anniversaries that seem to lurk under the radar of remembrance—yes, the year that your father died of cancer or your mother died of heart disease. These anniversaries are not celebrated but are rather feared. Many of my friends have silently approached such an anniversary with dread.

My own father died of cancer at age forth-seven after he had sired eleven children and helped to deliver ten of them. Money was scarce and no doctor was ever called in those days. But since my mother was pregnant with me when my father died, she had to call a doctor for the first time when I came into the world. From that time on I suppose my brothers silently feared approaching the age of 47 and as luck would have it, all of them reached that age safely.