‘Voir Dire’ Is a Timely, if Not Timeless, Play

Six jurors must decide the fate of a New York school principal who’s charged with possession of crack cocaine.

That’s the premise of Joe Sutton’s “Voir Dire” at Old Globe Theatre’s Cassius Carter Centre Stage. Sutton, loosely basing his plot on a real trial, asks probing questions about the criminal justice system--but stops probing at a critical point near the end.

The play’s structure is similar to that of “Twelve Angry Men,” but its purpose is different. Instead of triumphantly showing how one juror’s doubts can convince the others to free an innocent man, it demonstrates how jurors can begin to feel as if they, too, are on trial, that there is no easy way out, no truly satisfying outcome.

As in “Twelve Angry Men,” jurors are the only onstage characters. The play begins during the jury selection process (a.k.a. voir dire) with brief monologues from each prospective juror, including interior thoughts as well as answers to questions asked by an unseen attorney. This process is designed to eliminate anyone who might consider something other than the evidence, and all the jurors believe they qualify. But other considerations arise once they’re thrown together--questions of race, overall police credibility and whether the punishment is right for the alleged crime.

Most of the play is set in the jury room as the jurors grope toward their agonizing verdict. But a couple of scenes are in a hotel where this sequestered jury sleeps, and another set of brief monologues closes the play with post-trial thoughts from each juror.

Whether the six jurors (that’s the number used for misdemeanor criminal trials in New York) represent the defendant’s “peers” becomes a key question. He’s a black man. The lone black juror (Kimberly Scott) is wary about the implications of race. Her concern is echoed by a temperamental white woman (Anne O’Sullivan) who, we later learn, has a black boyfriend.

A tense Latina woman (Yolanda Lloyd Delgado) is harder to read--she hardly speaks. She’s felled by stomach problems that, at one point, threaten to derail the trial.

The temperamental woman accuses the one male juror (Bill Geisslinger) of sexist bullying. His voice does have an edge, but it’s not as sharp as that of his accuser.

The other two jurors are white women who appear relatively affluent. One of them (Robin Pearson Rose) is recently divorced and afraid that a professional rival will take over her job while she’s gone. The other (Andee Mason) is accused of not being a “peer” because she moved to New York from Nebraska fairly recently.

As the debate heats up, arguments slide into insults. The question of who is qualified to pass judgment becomes nasty, but it also seems impossible to avoid, as does the question of what a verdict’s consequences might be.

During their first hotel scenes, the jurors acknowledge they’re not supposed to discuss the case outside the jury room. But in the second hotel scene, two jurors--away from the others--ignore this and begin discussing their opinions and what the verdict might accomplish. The next day, this emerges as a turning point, and the juror who was swayed by the conversation even says who swayed her in front of the others.

No one notices the impropriety of this. True, the play was written before the O.J. Simpson trial, so the subject of juror dismissals was not as familiar as it is now. But it appears as if Sutton decided not to further muddy the waters with an even more complicated, less conventional ending--which makes his play less interesting and illuminating than it might have been.

Still, he raises plenty of questions that have a fierce urgency right now because of recent high-profile trials, and Craig Noel’s arena-style staging does justice to the drama, with the exception of faint distracting sounds (designer: Jeff Ladman) during some scenes.

This is not a play for the ages--but if you’re going to see it, now is the time.

* “Voir Dire,” Cassius Carter Centre Stage, Old Globe Theatre, Balboa Park, San Diego. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 7 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday matinees, 2 p.m. Ends April 7. $28-$38. (619) 239-2255. Running time: 2 hours.