Lindsey Ferrentino’s ‘Fear of 13’ arrives on Broadway at the James Earl Jones Theatre, following its Olivier Award-nominated run in London.
The Broadway production of Fear of 13, written by Lindsey Ferrentino and directed by Tony Award winner David Cromer, brings Nick Yarris’s story to the stage through a deeply personal, psychologically driven narrative. The production stars Academy Award winner Adrien Brody alongside Tessa Thompson, both making their Broadway debuts, and officially opened on April 15, following previews that began March 19, averaging attendance above 90% ahead of its official opening.
After a routine traffic stop in 1981 leads to a wrongful conviction, Nick Yarris finds himself confined to a jail cell for over two decades as he awaits execution on death row. The play begins with him and several other inmates sharing their stories, offering insight into their lives and the realities of being forgotten as death row inmates within the Pennsylvania penal system.
A newly appointed prison volunteer and Ph.D. student, played by Thompson, approaches each of them with empathy and a willingness to listen. Stuck between a sense of powerlessness and hope, she encourages the men to speak openly, eventually taking a particular interest in Nick. She repeatedly pushes him not only to share the stories of others, but to confront and articulate his own and the events that led to him being there.
While Fear of 13 works hard to represent the arc of Yarris’s time as an inmate, its scope at times feels limited. It largely avoids engaging with the broader racial realities that shape incarceration in America and how Black and Brown individuals’ encounters with law enforcement can be deadly. Although Yarris’s story highlights a grave injustice, the system itself extends far beyond one individual experience. That racial tension between him as a white man is missing from the story, with only a passing joke by Thompson. It could have been a point of tension while showcasing the injustice of it all, irrespective of his race.
The play leans heavily on monologues, with Brody often talking to the audience as a one-man show while he goes through his experiences in solitary confinement. While these moments can be powerful, they occasionally feel extended or unfocused. There is a singing number as Nick recounts a love story between two inmates, Wesley (Ephraim Sykes) and Butch (Michael Cavinder), adding an unexpected layer of vulnerability to the two-hour production. Their emotional connection is evident, though it is only given space to develop across a limited number of scenes.
He excitedly recounts being free through the retelling of his prison escape, which inspired the 2015 documentary of the same name. He credits the name to his days in prison, when he immersed himself in reading and learning new words. Triskaidekaphobia, or the fear of the number 13, mirrors the uncertainty of his experience as a wrongfully convicted inmate.
As the play comes to an end, Nick shares a story about being assaulted in his childhood and the lasting scar it leaves on him. It may have worked better to introduce this part of his background earlier in the play, as it feels like a sudden addition toward the end. It would have provided helpful context for his character and explored his origin before incarceration. Who was Nick before all of this, and how did faulty evidence overrule the truth?
(Courtesy Fear of 13)
Still, Fear of 13 succeeds in capturing the emotional weight of one man’s experience within the prison system. The performances by the cast, as well as the staging and production, ground viewers in a real-life tragedy. While the narrative attempts to bring to life his years as an inmate, it leaves more questions than answers on the larger takeaway of the project. Is the goal to preserve his story or to confront the system that put him there?
