TWELVE ANGRY ANIMALS

An Epilogue in Development

Twelve Angry Animals is a new adaptation of Reginald Rose’s iconic play Twelve Angry Men, written by Grindstaff, in which each of the twelve jurors is reimagined as a member of a highly threatened non-human animal species. This unique jury has been empaneled, sometime in the future, in a post-apocalyptic New York, to determine whether or not the last remaining human being should be held guilty for the destruction of the planet. The piece is a moving meditation on collective responsibility, shared vulnerability and ecological precarity in the Anthropocene designed to beg questions of inequality on a planetary scale. 

Twelve Angry Animals was developed with NYU Tisch in the fall of 2019 with the talented student body as performers and designers with the exception of the music and masks. This residency served as a teaching modality as well as a developmental step and Phantom Limb plans to continue towards a professional production with design and movement collaborators. 

 This work deals with pressing issues of environmental injustice through a lens of species-ism in its own right as well as being an allegory for climate change race and class injustice. Who gets to have a say in who survives and who is at the other end of that decision? This project hopes to illuminate this disparity. With further dramaturgical work, script development and finally developmental residencies to devise the movement, this piece will serve as a powerful epilogue to the Environmental Trilogy created by Phantom Limb over the past decade. 

PROCESS TO PREMIERE