In the autumn of 2024, the playwright Lindsey Ferrentino took a former convict named Nick Yarris to a preview performance of her new work, “The Fear of 13,” in London. The play, by turns harrowing, tragic and mordantly funny, dramatizes the 21 years that Yarris, portrayed onstage by Adrien Brody, spent on death row in Pennsylvania for a murder he did not commit.
Seeing his grueling prison ordeal unfolding before him in the theater, Yarris, now 64, was “audibly reacting louder than anyone else,” Ferrentino recalled, causing a neighboring audience member to ask him to keep it down. But a video that was shown after the curtain fell revealed that this was Yarris, the play’s subject, and “everyone nearby just sort of reached out and put their hands on him,” Ferrentino said. “No one had words — what do you say? — but they were all silently trying to hug him or put their hands on his back.”
“It was the greatest moment I’ve ever had in the theater,” she said.
The play, which had an eight-week, sold-out run at the Donmar Warehouse in London, received two Olivier Award nominations, for best new play and best actor for Brody. Now “The Fear of 13” has opened on Broadway, for a limited run at the James Earl Jones Theater. For its New York iteration, the play has changed considerably, with tweaks to the script; a larger cast of actors playing prison guards, inmates and other characters; a new director (David Cromer); and a new actress (Tessa Thompson) in the role of Jacki, a death-row volunteer who falls in love with Yarris.
The play is Ferrentino’s second Broadway production this season. She also wrote the book for “The Queen of Versailles,” a splashy new musical starring Kristin Chenoweth and F. Murray Abraham that failed to connect with audiences and closed in December, earlier than the producers had hoped. (The show had 32 previews and just 49 regular performances.) But “The Fear of 13” marks a return to what Ferrentino is best known for: plays like “Ugly Lies the Bone” and “Amy and the Orphans,” which demonstrate what the critic Ben Brantley, writing in The New York Times, called her “muscular empathy which seeks to enter the minds of people for whom life is often a struggle of heroic proportions.”
As for Ferrentino, she is taking the setback in stride. “It’s great, as a playwright, not to be pigeonholed,” she said of branching out into musicals for “The Queen of Versailles,” which was adapted from Lauren Greenfield’s 2012 documentary about a couple’s quest to build a palatial home and featured the music of Stephen Schwartz (“Wicked”). “But this is the type of play that I like to write, where I take political issues and humanize them to reflect a bigger national narrative.”
One of the core propositions of “The Fear of 13” — how Yarris’s punishing personal story illustrates larger truths about the contradictions and cruelties of the United States’ carceral system — naturally plays differently in New York than in London. Britain has not put a prisoner to death since 1964, and formally abolished the death penalty in 1998.
“The primary thing that resonates with us as Americans is how familiar these stories are,” Brody, who received an Olivier Award nomination for his performance in London, said in a video interview. “The criminal justice system is such an ingrained part of our understanding of ourselves.” Brody, who grew up in Queens, saw how easily a simple misstep could land someone on the wrong side of the law. When his mother, the photographer Sylvia Plachy, took him along on an assignment to photograph inmates at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, the maximum-security prison known as Angola, he saw what prison actually looked like.
“As soon as you step foot in prison, you cannot help but see how oppressive it is,” he said. “It is crushing to live on the edge of that threat of violence, while trying to maintain a degree of strength and control.”
Yarris’s excruciating, violent and tedious journey through the system is recreated in flashbacks as he tells Jacki about his past. Growing up in Pennsylvania, he slipped into a life of petty crime, stealing and selling cars to support his drug and alcohol habit. In 1981, driving a stolen car while high, he was pulled over by the police for what began as a routine traffic stop and escalated into a confrontation. After an officer’s gun went off, Yarris, then 20, was charged with kidnapping and attempted murder.
In jail awaiting trial and facing a lengthy sentence if convicted, Yarris said that he made a false claim that would alter his life forever. Thinking that he could bargain for better treatment, he claimed that he knew who was responsible for the rape and murder of a woman named Linda Craig, whose killing he had read about in the newspaper. His plan backfired: The man he had accused was ruled out as a suspect. Though Yarris had never met Craig, he ended up being charged with, and convicted of, her abduction, rape and murder. He was sentenced to death — but was acquitted of the initial charges connected to the traffic stop.
Yarris would spend more than two decades on death row, with additional years tacked on — as if extra years matter to a man sentenced to die — after he briefly escaped while being transported to a post-sentencing hearing. After reading an article in 1989 about the nascent science of DNA testing, Yarris became one of the first death-row inmates in the United States to ask that it be applied to his case.
But because of achingly long delays, it took years for his request to be granted. Testing revealed that DNA found at the scene did not match his. In 2004, Yarris walked free.
“Despite the 22 years that the commonwealth did its best to kill me, I used the opportunity to become a good man,” Yarris said in court before his release.
Yarris’s story was featured in a 2005 documentary, “After Innocence”; in a memoir, “Seven Days to Live”; and in a second documentary, “The Fear of 13,” released by Netflix in 2015 and featuring Yarris, alone, narrating his journey through the prison system. (It can now be streamed on YouTube.) Ferrentino, searching for distractions while isolating with her parents in Florida during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, stumbled on the Netflix program.
She was mesmerized by the fluent, novelistic way Yarris expressed himself, honed from years of reading anything he could get his hands on in prison. In just three years, he said, he read 1,000 books. (Yarris also made a point of learning as many new words as he could, memorizing them by repeatedly using them in sentences. One was “triskaidekaphobia,” which means “the fear of 13.”)
Ferrentino was struck, too, by the dramatic possibilities of the film. “To me it was always a play,” she said. “I couldn’t shake the story, and as so often happens with true stories, I started chasing it.”
She contacted the director, David Sington, who put her in touch with Yarris. That was the beginning of a conversation about the play, and about life, that continues to this day. “He had a few requests,” she said. “Nick is hilarious as a person and he wanted to make sure that the play reflected his gallows humor.” He told her, she said: ‘My story is sad and you have to tell it how I tell it, which is that sometimes it’s funny and sometimes it’s beautiful — and it has to move between all of these moods.”
In a video interview, Yarris said that while he had been present around the production from the beginning, he had ceded creative license over the particulars of the play, including the depiction of his relationship with Jacki. “Whenever I see Adrien, I am so swept up in his beautiful performance that I forget everything else,” he said.
As for Brody, he said he was aiming to “gain what insight I can from Nick, rather than doing an impression of him.”
“He’s been an amazing resource to understand the complexity of how his journey has affected him,” Brody said. “What I tap into are the elements I feel I can represent most honestly.” Those include imagining what Yarris would have been like as a young man, for the flashback scenes showing how Yarris ended up in prison. “There are mannerisms and youthful gestures that aren’t Nick today, but are how I envision his physicality,” Brody said.
The Jacki in the play is a fictional character modeled on a real prison volunteer who grew close to Yarris while visiting him on death row. At first she’s the play’s narrator, guiding the audience into his world. Their conversations — Yarris telling his story to her, the reenacted flashbacks — form the heart of the play. The real-life relationship ended years ago; the woman’s name and identifying details have been changed, to protect her privacy.
Thompson, who is new to the production and is making her Broadway debut, said she “felt free to develop my own relationship to the character,” in part by reading about the prison system and meeting with actual prison volunteers.
“The character is a proxy for the audience,” she said. “You enter the prison with her. Every night in the audience there are people who have had experiences with the carceral system and who are naturally sympathetic to Jacki and to the men onstage. And then there are others who come in with misconceptions and biases and curiosity.”
Post-prison life has not been easy for Yarris. He eventually won a $4 million settlement from the state of Pennsylvania, but lives a peripatetic life and said he is often in pain from injuries sustained from beatings and fights in prison. He thinks often of Craig, the victim of the murder for which he was wrongly convicted and whose case remains unsolved. Still, watching Brody play him onstage, he said, is like “watching Pink Floyd perform ‘Dark Side of the Moon.’”
“I’m not supposed to be here,” he said. “I’m supposed to be dead. I have endless gratitude for just being alive.”
Sarah Lyall is a writer at large for The Times, writing news, features and analysis across a wide range of sections.
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