Adrien Brody and Tessa Thompson make their respective Broadway debuts in Lindsey Ferrentino’s play “The Fear of 13,” which opened Wednesday after a run at London’s Donmar Warehouse in 2024. Brody and Thompson are the names, but the other star here is David Cromer, this theater season’s best and most prolific director.
Preceding “The Fear of 13” are Cromer’s brilliant stagings of Tracy Letts’ “Bug” on Broadway and two wonderful new plays Off Broadway, Preston Max Allen’s “Caroline” and Talene Monahon’s “Meet the Cartozians.” For good measure, we can throw in one of last season’s best Broadway musicals, “Dead Outlaw,” by David Yazbek, Erik Della Penna and Itamar Moses. Cromer is clearly the go-to director every producer and writer must want to put on their show. For theatergoers, his name alone guarantees that the price of the ticket is well worth it.
Now for that bizarre, dramatic and heartbreaking true story told here by Ferrentino: Nick Yarris, a resident of Philadelphia, was convicted and sentenced to death for a rape and murder he did not commit. Yarris spent 22 years on Death Row before DNA evidence in 2004 proved his innocence. Released from prison at age 41, Yarris went on to write about that harrowing experience in the memoir “Seven Days to Live,” which became the 2015 documentary “The Fear of 13,” the source material for this new play.
Ferrentino wisely doesn’t reveal Yarris’ innocence until at least halfway through her two-hour, one-act play. The playwright also complicates the major plotline with various other lesser crimes that Yarris commits as a youth. If there’s a tragic flaw in Yarris’ character, it’s that he possesses an overactive imagination. For all the trauma on display, “The Fear of 13” is not a tragedy but rather a very stirring melodrama. Its lead characters — both Yarris (Brody) and Jacki Miles (Thompson), the prison volunteer who eventually marries this convict — are reactive to the extreme.
Under Cromer’s astute direction, both of them become punching-bag dolls, and it is often nearly unbearable to watch them being beaten up, physically as well as emotionally, for two hours. The prison guards, cops, lawyers and judges run the gamut from extremely brutal to simply incompetent. The talented ensemble of actors includes Michael Cavinder, Eddie Cooper, Victor Cruz, Joel Marsh Garland, Jeb Kreager and Ephraim Sykes.
Ferrentino tells this story through interviews Miles conducts with Yarris in prison. Thompson may be a little too naïve-acting in the production’s opening scenes, but she manages to dramatize the character’s extreme stoicism, not an easy task for any actor. Best of all, she never grows weepy, a condition that compromises the current Broadway revival of “Death of a Salesman.”
Brody also resists the grand gesture, even though Yarris is a very flashy character, especially in the way he tells a story. It has been said of movie actors that a great face is more important than great talent. Paul Newman comes to mind. Of course, Marlon Brando possessed that rare combo of having both. I always thought stage actors were different. Talent is everything. Brody may be an exception. He’s definitely a gifted actor, and in “The Fear of 13,” he puts a damper on his tendency to push it, as he sometimes does onscreen. On stage, he’s a real theater animal and his performance is immeasurably enhanced by a face and body that rivet an audience’s attention for two straight hours.
If the great Al Hirschfeld were alive, he’d recreate Brody’s physique in a minimum of very long vertical lines. Brody works magic with those few strokes of an actor’s pen.
