I now introduce you to Juror #7! On this website page, I will walk you through some of my techniques in crafting detailed accounts of Juror #7’s life, personality, history, and more.
After my first reading of the script and our first few rehearsals, I started with a familiar exercise: Uta Hagen’s Six Questions. This was a baseline activity I wanted to use to organize my thoughts and feelings about Juror 7 before I truly got to step into her shoes.
- Who am I? I am a lovely lady with better things to do than spend my time in this stuffy jury room after a 6-day trial.
- What are the circumstances? It’s summer, it’s hot! We have been learning the ins and outs of this case for almost a week and it is finally time to conclude. Eleven of us are on the same page, but there is one stubborn juror who disagrees with us.
- What are my relationships? I’m friendly to everyone I meet! Unless they disagree with me… or annoy me… or talk too much… or I don’t like them. My “friends” here include Juror 6 and Jurors 10 and 3, and I especially cannot stand Foreman, Juror 8, and Juror 11.
- What do I want? I want to go home! We don’t have all day for this, and I’ve got show tickets for tonight that I refuse to miss.
- What is my obstacle? My obstacle is Juror 8 and all the soft-headed folks she may convince to join her side. The faster we come to a unified conclusion, whether the boy is guilty, innocent, or if we’re a hung jury, the better.
- What do I do to get what I want? I speak up even when no one wants me to! I use my voice, sometimes in rude ways, to get people to see things the way I do and convince the group that we should wrap this up and get out of here.
Also, in the early-middle stages of building Juror #7’s character, I borrowed the following template from a fellow actor to jot down some objective facts concerning my character’s past, present, and future traits:
Character Biography “Building a Character”
Play Title: Twelve Angry Jurors
Character Name: Juror #7
PHYSICAL
Age: Self-sustaining married adult–anywhere from 30s-50s.
Posture: Upright, polite, and presentable; she takes herself very seriously
Cleanliness: Polished and pretty, manicured nails, heavy makeup/lipstick, and sensibly styled hair.
Dialect: New York (city/island)
Tempo/Gestures/Movement/Speech: Often in a hurry, but likes to take her time moving lavishly when she can be the center of attention.
PERSONALITY
Ambition: High when it is self-serving, she does not empathize well with others
Education: Not relevant, or at the least, does not support her tendency to talk passionately about things she knows nothing about.
Ability to Reason: Low, unless it is in her best interest.
Alertness/Daydreamer: She is listening to respond, not to understand.
Self-Image/Ego: She has an enormous ego. She wants to be the brightest light in the room, the center of attention, and for everyone to see how put-together and clever she is. This is tested incessantly by the end of the play.
Giving: None. She gives into the guilty vote partially out of being convinced, but more so out of wanting the deliberation to be over. And she is embarrassed to have been wrong in the first place.
Reliability: Nope. She’s a flaky little lady who is very self-centered.
Jealousy/Fear/Pride/Inferiority: Yep! She simultaneously has a god complex and an inferiority complex that she is constantly trying to remedy by making herself seem bigger than she is.
Thoughts About Other Characters: The ones who agree with her: she does. The ones that don’t: she doesn’t.
Other Characters’ Thoughts About Him/Her: I assume they find her chatty, annoying, or uninformed.
ENVIRONMENT
Husband/Wife Status: Married
Residence/Status: Born, raised, and lives in NYC.
Job/Salary/Social Class Previous Action/Off-Stage Action: Well off–not rich by any means, but spends everything she can to make herself seem shinier and wealthier than she is.
Super objective: END THIS DELIBERATION!
Secondary Objectives: Change people’s minds so they join the majority vote for guilty, embarrass jurors 8 and 11 so they give up, and cool down in this stuffy awkward room.
Obstacles: The other jurors. Mostly 8, 9, 11, and anyone who votes not guilty before she does.
A Journal Entry From the POV of Juror #7…
Inspired by the journaling process I undertook in Acting 2, I’ve taken up one specific prompt to help me organize my thought process within the action of the play [date of journal September 12th, 2024]. The journal prompt is as follows;
Using first person POV (I, we, my, me) Identify the precise given circumstances of the scene: the immediate circumstances of time, place, preceding events, and subsequent destination. Identify outer and inner objects that attract your attention in the course of the scene (identify your personal versions, or substitutions, for these objects in parentheses). Provide images and other sensory information that support your discoveries and fuel your imagination and impulses. Identify activities that can increase your involvement in the circumstances. Conclude with a one-sentence statement of your scene objective and a list of at least ten possible actions. For this journal, the “scene” that I discuss will be the first five minutes or so in the courtroom through the first official vote (11 Guilty to 1 Not Guilty):
We have finally made it to the deliberation room, and it sure as hell feels like it’s taken a million years to get here. I almost died in court, you’d think they’d ever heard of a box fan or an extra pair of hands waving an oversized leaf around! Well–maybe I’ve seen too many movies to justify that last one. But really! It’s summer, and it must have been a hundred degrees in that courtroom. I doubt it will be, but God-willing, maybe the deliberation room will be more comfortable. Not that I plan on being here for long, this will be a quick decision. My destination? Out of this horrid room. It’s stuffy in here surrounded by these uptight humorless strangers. Nobody seems to understand what I’ve got to get home to; my husband and I finally scored tickets to My Fair Lady–about a year after its release no less–and I do not intend on missing it! (Dad and I, the DC→NY Uber, Hadestown).
The judge sure was a piece of work…Well, I mean, she was very serious about her job. She seems very passionate about our ability to deliberate honestly (BG audition panel). What a waste of time! That trial must have cost a fortune; so many people were involved in, what seems to me, an obvious situation. The boy and his father don’t get along, you know how it is, and things went too far! It doesn’t matter now, I truly think the boy is guilty, and nothing could change my mind, and even if they did–I wouldn’t care too much, so long as we get dismissed from this abysmal trial.
I’ve got one cigarette left in my purse, and if it weren’t so hot, I’d probably be lighting it up right about now. But I’m trying to cut it down, so I’ll save it for an emergency and opt for a piece of chewing gum instead. I abhor the flavor, but it does curve the cravings (water before bed on late nights), which is what I was just telling my new girlfriend Juror #6! Oh! Thank goodness they’ve got a window in here–let it swing open wide people, we need the air (Goolrick fans). My blouse has a wonderful puff feature in the back which allows for better airflow, and silk shade is quite a nice color on me, but I can feel the cuffs sticking to the sweat on my wrists, I suppose I’ll have to keep readjusting to keep them from sticking so bad that the fabric stains or becomes too delicate (morning nose-strip) and beads of sweat from forming on my brow.
Ah, would you look at that, there’s a seat next to my best friend, Juror #6, that’s convenient! Although, these chairs are heinous. Very stiff, and I have a feeling I’ll be changing my posture every few moments just to stay as comfortable as I can (Goolrick floor, freshman year acting 1). One thing about me is I love small talk! Especially sprinkled with a little gossip, and I just know Juror #10 feels the same way; I think I’ll ask her what she thought about the boy’s stupid knife story. Ugh, it’s time to get this show on the road, but not before I dazzle the room a little by taking my hat off nice and slowly. It’s just so I don’t mess up my French twist. To be perfectly candid, I love to be the center of attention.
The Foreman thinks that if we can all vote unanimously right off the bat–we could finish right away. YES PLEASE! I know where I stand and anyone in this room with sense will feel the same way (rehearsal blind vote). Juror. Number. 8. Has voted not guilty–and I CANNOT fathom why. This whole thing is testing my patience, and my God is it hot in here! How am I supposed to focus on anything when it’s so damn hot. And how am I supposed to entertain myself when all I’ve got in my purse is one lousy cigarette, a pack of gum, a comb and compact, and a nail file? Well, I suppose I’ll have a few ways of keeping my attention off this mind-numbing back-and-forth about the boy.
My scene objective (here) is to find a place to settle and cool off, despite my annoyance with the folks around me.
My super objective is to be as civil as I can be in this case, and I WILL help convince this crazy woman that the boy is guilty and we should get out of here!
10 possible actions…
- Guilt. Tell them about my show tickets, make them pity me and want to send me home as quickly as possible.
- Complain! Surely if I appear cross enough, the other jurors will want to get out of here as soon as possible.
- Provoke. I’m not afraid to speak my mind, so the first thing I’ll try is loudly convincing this woman that she’s wrong!
- Mollify/Ignore Juror 8 and the case to the best of my ability, maybe the rest of them will get so fed up with me that they concede and vote guilty.
- Belittle Juror 9 to death. If he can’t stand being in this room maybe he’ll help me convince the rest to vote unanimously!
- Pester! If I can make Juror 8 and anyone else holding us up think they’re the stupid ones here, maybe they will be so embarrassed that they want to leave quicker than they want justice.
- Overpower. Fight to be a hung jury. If there’s no unanimous vote, then we are simply not the jury for this job!
- Show Juror 8 that her demonstrations mean nothing against ours. We can cancel out her initial argument with a recreation of the crime–and convince her that she is not thinking logically!
- Begging! I am NOT below begging to get out of here. Move away from talk of the trial and try to get others to want to leave like I do. (“…we’re getting nowhere fast. Let’s stop all this arguing and go home”)
- Settle. Give up. Give in to the majority vote so I can GET OUT!
Text-Proven Facts:
- “I was born right here.” – born and likely raised New Yorker, further justified by her accent
- “So would I….or if I couldn’t I’d see that his father did.” – this likely condones physical discipline of difficult children (“on a boy like that?”) this would suggest the probability of conservative political views
- “…She oughta write for Amazing Detective Monthly, she’d make a fortune.” – suggests reading the newspaper or staying up to date on pop culture, trends, and the ‘fun stuff’ in the paper
- “You couldn’t change my mind if you talked for a hundred years.” and later, “If you wanna be stubborn and hang this jury…” – not only does this prove stubbornness on HER part, claiming she simply won’t be convinced by any amount of discussion, it also suggests she is a little hypocritical. These two lines are spoken to the same character.
- “I think a murderer could use up thirty or forty seconds pretty easily at that point” – she is paying more attention than she lets on. This is a pretty straightforward response to the other Juror’s conversation about the crime–perhaps it is that she pays attention when she thinks it will benefit her opinion.
Ethics, Politics, and More:
After scanning the script for any in-depth information on Juror #7’s personality, political, or ethical views, I was led to create a list of educated guesses about her. This helped me internally to create a more vivid picture of her life and perspectives from start to finish.
- She is married and does many fun activities with her husband (theatre; My Fair Lady). Her pride in her marriage indicates that she looks down upon any unmarried woman for being untoward, at least a little. Women got married very, very young in the 50s, and divorce was uncommon, or at the very least, left unspoken.
- Her stubbornness stems from her lack of empathy. Her expressions of agreeing to the physical disciplines of children lead me to believe she has been raised a certain way, leading her to see nothing wrong with extreme methods to teach kids a lesson. It is never mentioned whether she has children or not. But, since she tends to speak about things she knows nothing about, I believe she does not have any children with her husband.
- Furthermore, her lack of children, at such an adult age, would be unseemly! In this era, you were expected to start having children once you married. So, it reinforces my text-driven hypothesis that she is a hypocritical person. She does not care what others think of her behind her back, so long as, to her face, they appear very impressed.
- Her wardrobe and tendency to flaunt random personal facts solidify her need to be the center of attention. She walks into that deliberation room wearing a sparkly hat and a bright hot-pink coat. She wants people to look at her, agree with her, ask her questions, and be impressed with her.
- When Juror #4 is called out for her custom dress, Juror #7 is peeved. Juror #7’s outfit is not custom, but she thinks she looks much more attractive and distinguished than Juror #4!
- Looking at money…physically, she wears more jewelry than any other juror. Not only that, her jewelry is flashy and noisy. Her bracelets (which carry jewels in every color of the rainbow) jingle when she walks, and her necklace has three strings of golden orbs, pearls, and glass beads. She wants to catch the light and make people turn their heads. That being said, since all of the jewelry is simply costume jewelry for the sake of theatrics, I have adopted this idea that her jewelry is probably all if not mostly fake.
- As part of her costuming, Kevin took into account that she supposedly works in a department store and is very poor. Her husband pays the bills and gives her too much extra cash to spend on shiny things.