We went to DC this weekend to see my friend Charles in the Roundabout Theater Company’s traveling production of Twelve Angry Men. You probably remember the 1957 movie version (directed by Sidney Lumet); it was black and white and full of sweat and fury.

It was also a lesson in democracy and like the play on which it was based a sort of ham-fisted yet durable testament to the legal system. What made Reginald Rose’s story so innovative then was its concentration on the jury; until then courtroom dramas centered on the trial itself and the only important players were the defendants, the witnesses and possibly the lawyers. The judge was just an black robe and the jury was just a set of pawns, who filed back into the courtroom at the trial’s end with few surprises and no hint of having suffered in deliberation. Who knew what went on back in that jury room? Who cared?

Rose, a regular writer in the golden age of early TV drama, had served on a New York jury and was moved to recreate the experience in a real-time staged environment. The big clock on the jury room wall ticks for actors and audience alike and the heated deliberations over the evidence that will send a kid to the electric chair for murdering his father reach a boiling point several times in the course of the production, keeping everyone on their toes. “That play’s just like a carnival ride,” Charles — who plays the blue-collar mediator, Juror No. 6 — said after the performance. “Once you get on, it just takes off.”

Despite the rather stock characters — the advertising weasel, the blowhard bigot, the well-meaning foreigner — the prejudice that is at the heart of the play (and the trial) remains a timely topic. The Other on trial is a race of people (Puerto Ricans in Rose’s day) that could just as easily be — I dunno — illegal aliens or suspected Arab terrorists today. In fact, Charles said that the Secret Service had swept the theater the night before because Condi Rice and Alberto Gonzalez were in attendance. I hope they were listening when Juror No. 9 asks the bigoted Juror No. 10, “Do you think you were born with a monopoly on the truth?”