The other day, the New York Times – the new, exciting New York Times – ran an important-looking story about Tom Hanks’s next movie. Apparently some computer wizards have devised a way to digitize Mr. Hanks, so he can play every part, in every setting. The technique will cost the producers more than $1 million per minute of screen time.

What’s this got to do with “Twelve Angry Men?” you want to know. A fair question, and I’m getting there. The really funny thing about the story, which explained how Mr. Hanks could play many characters on a single soundstage, without a bunch of costumes, is what it didn’t say. If I understand it right, the goal of this new technology is not so exotic. They’re using the best toys money can buy to create a digital equivalent of “I Am My Own Wife.” Jefferson Mays is brilliant at playing three dozen roles on a single set, in a black dress. I do not believe they pay him a million a minute.

Certainly you can’t expect every arts reporter in the city to share my monomania with Things You Can Only Do in a Theater, or its corollary, Things Better Left to Film. A lucky break, in this case, because if the reporter did share it, then I couldn’t write about it here. And then I’d really have nothing to say about “Twelve Angry Men.”

Why bother? is an excellent question. It captures, in two tiny words, the essence of the thing. But Why bother? does not a column make. You see my trouble.

People hail Sidney Lumet’s 1957 film version of the story as a classic, as people should. The script, by Reginald Rose, proceeds like a “Law and Order” episode in reverse. A teenaged boy is accused of stabbing his father, and looks guilty. Evidence must be painstakingly disassembled, to establish – not to surmount – reasonable doubt. Henry Fonda played Juror Eight, the lone voice of restraint, and Lee J. Cobb was the volcanic Juror Three, who would execute the boy himself, if they let him.

Is it fair to judge the stage version, which opened last night at the American Airlines Theatre, against the film? Director Scott Ellis invites it. The production is not so much adapted as imported. Even though this version uses a script by the original author, it smacks of elbowing in on somebody else’s party.

The deviations that do exist tend to make the film look better. Fonda and Cobb are the least of the losses. You lose, too, Mr. Lumet’s crafty camera work, its focus and intensity. Of course, Mr. Ellis tries.When a handful of jurors retire to the men’s room, the entire courthouse set shifts to one side, so we can follow them. (It was clever of the Roundabout to use this contraption during “Twentieth Century,” when the sliding set depicted a moving train; the trick is less lyrical when it depicts a gliding men’s room.)

We lose, too, some of Mr. Lumet’s grace. One of the most potent moments in the film comes when Juror Ten erupts in a racist outburst, and one by one the other men get up from the table and turn their backs on him. That scene here is clumsy, noisy, inadequate.

The show has plenty going for it, I should add. You can’t get more timely than the frustrated, sanguinary juror who barks, “Details! You’re just letting yourself get bulldozed by a bunch ‘a what d’ya call ’em-intellectuals! “The Roundabout also resisted the lure of star casting, as admirable as it is surprising. Michael Mastro is funny and lively in the Jack Klugman role, and James Rebhorn is dry and sane (though in an awful hurry) as the logical businessman. Boyd Gaines doesn’t have Henry Fonda’s ability to make everydayness charming, but who does? The villains are mostly overplayed. Philip Bosco (Juror Three) and Peter Friedman (Juror Ten) are all sound and fury, signifying little.

Mr. Hanks and his geniuses are trying to make a film behave like a play; Mr. Ellis wants to make a play out of what is irrevocably a film. He tries to juggle the actors and keep everybody moving, but ultimately we’re still watching 12 men, sitting at a table, talking. (Actually, we’re listening – half the time you only see their backs.) If it’s going to be in a theater, it ought to be theatrical. Onstage it could go where film can’t, say, by offering glimpses of minds in motion, of inner monologue. Depicting someone thinking out loud can be a very effective way to liven up a play, or a theater review.

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Writing about Sarah Kane’s life means grappling with Sarah Kane’s death. Before committing suicide five years ago, at 28, she wrote a handful of unsparing, lyrical, graphic plays, somewhat in the tradition of Edward Bond.

Her play “4:48 Psychosis,” which gets its American premiere this week at St. Ann’s Warehouse, deals with the darkest moments in the darkest nights of the soul. You hear echoes of Buchner’s despair, and the bitter comedy of Beckett. The director James MacDonald (who directed the original production at the Royal Court) said the play isn’t exactly autobiography. But it’s not autobiography, either. “My mind is the subject of these bewildered fragments,” runs one line. The twin frames we apply as an audience – Kane as explorer of depression, Kane as sufferer of depression – bring to mind the last album of the brilliant, self-annihilating Elliott Smith.

Three unnamed characters (Jason Hughes, Marin Ireland, Jo McInnes) deliver Kane’s sketches of clarity and madness. An enormous mirror hangs behind them, creating a disorienting double image. Her scattershot texts run to loneliness, anger, and the frustration of her life, buttressed with lists: clinical symptoms, pharmaceuticals.

The play has power, but not the cumulative kind; I was as moved after the first 10 minutes as I was after the full 70. Kane’s writing here ranges from the juvenile to the penetrating. Jeremy Herbert’s spare design, with hints of video, adds to the worldly, otherworldly feel. No matter how she expresses it, you have to admire her rare ability to expose painful truths, and to bewail all that she did not have the time to become.