THE FEAR OF 13: Whose Life Is It Anyway? – Review
I’ve not seen the namesake documentary on which Lindsey Ferrentino’s play The Fear of 13 is based, but reviews of the 2015 film note its “intriguing mystery” (Time Out) and the “riveting” (The Times), “labyrinthine journey [...] about the art of storytelling” (The Guardian) it crafts in telling the tale of Nick Yarris, a Philadelphia native who spent 22 years on death row for a gruesome crime he did not commit. As directed by David Cromer in rare disjointed form, the production which opened at the James Earl Jones Theatre has none of that going for it, save for two game lead performances by Adrien Brody and Tessa Thompson, making their Broadway debuts.
Yarris’ biography is set for classic melodrama: He filled his youth with petty crimes before escalating to car-jacking and attacking a police officer while under the influence. When a woman turns up dead nearby, why shouldn’t a jury think the 20-year-old boy is crying innocent wolf? We, of course, know he’s innocent, though Ferrentino spends an inordinate amount of time letting him charm us through the direct audience addresses that take up most of the production’s two-hour runtime.
Brody is expectedly watchable and uber-committed, though the white-boy-swag vibe he loves to affect becomes grating in the wandering play, whose first 80 minutes or so are mostly just Yarris/Brody doing his thing while the plot assembles in the background. If that structure is meant to reflect destiny’s quietly uncaring machinations, the script is not nearly meaty enough to uphold it. Nick eventually falls for, and marries, Jacki (Thompson) a kind-hearted prison volunteer. It’s only when the two start to feel the weight of time on their relationship, in a skillfully rendered scene where his path to freedom locks into a regressive pattern through a series of procedural blunders, that the play finally takes on a painful immediacy and stance against the inefficiencies of our justice system.
If this sounds like a two-hander, it probably should have been. There’s a solid cast surrounding the leads, including Joel Marsh Garland as a prison guard – the only other fixed role in a production that fumbles the split between its featured performers (Michael Cavinder, Eddie Cooper, Victor Cruz, Jeb Kreager and Ephraim Sykes) and its ensemble (Eboni Flowers, Jared Wayne Gladly, Joe Joseph and Ben Thompson), all of whom play various parts, none very important.
It’s likely a matter of navigating contracts and understudies and, sure, Cooper gets more to do than Joseph, but Cromer assigns roles with a shocking dearth of strategy. There’s a flashback Sykes exits as one of Nick’s old friends before returning, some 45 seconds later, as his lawyer. Since his entrance is set up as bad news for Nick’s upcoming trial, a few audience members at the performance I attended laughed upon Sykes’ reemergence, thinking the lead’s crime buddy had made a sudden career pivot. Surely someone else could have taken that part. (Sykes is otherwise innocent, if largely wasted, and the couple of songs he performs seem a tacit acknowledgement, by Ferrentino or Cromer, that they don’t have much to work with.)
The Broadway production, which aside from Brody has enlisted an entirely different team from the play’s 2024 premiere in London, is nicely noirish. Arnulfo Maldonado’s unfussy prison set is evocative and effective, with somber brick walls flanking a back wall stacked with jail cells imposingly lit by Heather Gilbert. But this too makes the brief excursions, like a mid-show appearance of Jacki’s well-appointed home feel like an unnecessary attempt to keep things fresh.
Ferrentino, whose musical adaptation of the 2012 documentary The Queen of Versailles opened earlier this season, has a good eye for true stories ripe for dramatization, but again fails to land a consistent tone. Much of this, as in Versailles, is due to the multiplicity of voices she admits into her storytelling; a keystone of documentaries’ allowance of real people to say their piece, but a tactic that typically muddles dramatic coherence. It’s noble to grant Jacki the same chance to share her side with us – and it’s basically 70% of what the underutilized Thompson, who can channel deep currents of sympathy with a single tilt of the head, gets to do – but there’s nothing she adds that Nick couldn’t have handled himself. It is, after all, his life on the line.
The Fear of 13 is in performance through July 12, 2026 at the James Earl Jones Theatre on West 48th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.
