Twelve Harvard students file into a room wearing jackets and ties. Aside from their formal attire and the adult setting they find themselves in, their awkward conversations and adolescent posture quickly betray them as college students. This is the beginning of “Twelve Angry Men,” directed by Julia M. Runcie ’10 and Sonia G. DeYoung ’10 and produced by Joy Ding ’10, which runs through this Friday in the Loeb Ex. The play details the deliberation of a jury that must decide the fate of a 16-year-old boy on trial for murder. Although the actors are initially a little slow to lose their student demeanors, as they sit down to discuss the case, their characters emerge with convincing force. As a company, the cast evokes not only the heat of the play’s summer setting, but also the heat of the deep and varied feelings that boil beneath the surface of each man.

Initially, eleven of the twelve jurors are sure of the boy’s guilt. Only Juror #8 (Jay D. Musen ’09) is not convinced. With his commitment to the principle of “innocent until proven guilty,” Musen successfully provides the moral force that drives the play forward. His even-tempered conviction only breaks occasionally into anger, frustration, or doubt. The steadiness of his character serves as a counterpoint for the changing dynamics among the other eleven jurors.

Musen’s greatest opponent in the room is Juror #3 (Jeffrey C. Witt ’09). Witt not only takes on the violence of his character’s desire to see the boy sent to the chair; he deftly portrays the depth of the man’s character underneath his anger. Although initially repulsive, Witt brings out his character’s underlying humanity.

Strong performances on the part of the secondary characters add important variety to the tensions that Musen and Pitt establish. Daniel E. Catomeris ’11 plays Juror #7, whose main motive for voting guilty is his desire to wrap up the deliberation so he can see the Yankees game that night. His character, complete with a New York accent and a Yankee fan’s overconfidence, is the source of many of the lighter moments in the play. By contrast, Juror #9 (Gus T. Hickey ’11) commands the attention and empathy of both the jury and the audience when he, an old man himself, earnestly describes what it feels like to be elderly and overlooked.

Runcie and Young’s direction fully complements the strength of their cast. The play is excellently paced, with varying moments of noisy dissension, tense silence, and light humor. They make very good use of the space in the Ex, ensuring that the uninteresting picture of 12 jurors seated around a table rarely remains static for long. The set starts out as an orderly room, yellow walls lit by the sidelights streaming through stage windows, with a table and chairs neatly in the center. By the end of the play, however, the lights have dimmed, the chairs are in disarray, and a switchblade is left with its point stuck into a stack of papers.

Despite their stilted opening moments, the cast of “Twelve Angry Men” turns out to be unexpectedly cohesive and intelligent in their performances. The artistic decisions of the directors help bring out the most important moments without detracting from the subtleties of character that each member of the cast establishes. By the close of act one, the audience is completely drawn into the details of the case and the passionate opinions of each member of the jury, as Juror #8 slowly convinces his fellows to question the inner workings of the case, each other, and, finally, themselves.

—Staff writer Rachel A Burns can be reached at rburns@fas.harvard.edu.