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Broadway review by Adam Feldman
Rating: not recommended
Ticketing: Buy tickets to The Fear of 13
When adapting one-person stage shows for other mediums, it is common to open them up with multiple actors and locations, whether in films such as A Bronx Tale and My Big Fat Greek Wedding or even whole TV series such as Fleabag and Baby Reindeer. Lindsey Ferrentino’s drama The Fear of 13 reverses this process. The play is closely based on David Sington’s 2015 documentary about Nick Yarris, a Pennsylvania man who spent more than 20 years on Death Row before being exonerated by DNA evidence in 2003. The film is an absorbing 95-minute monologue in which Yarris describes his long ordeal in detail; Ferrentino’s adaptation, though still anchored in narration by Yarris, builds out his stories for an onstage cast of eight. The end result is bigger but not, I fear, better.
It’s not that this version of The Fear of 13 is bad. It’s a respectable telling of a worthy story. Adrien Brody, who played Nick in the play’s 2024 London premiere and reprises the role on Broadway, is effective throughout Yarris’s journey from teenage criminal and meth addict to the victim of a system that is infuriatingly; he also conveys enough broken charm to make us believe that he could spark with the Jacki (a quite luminous Tessa Thompson), a charitable volunteer whose prison visits blossom into more. Jacki’s part in the story has been expanded significantly in Ferrentino’s version; there’s a Parade-like quality to the couple’s shared quest for justice, as she fights in the outside world to keep hope (and Nick) alive. The rest of the actors, including Ephraim Sykes and Eddie Cooper, play multiple roles—prisoners, guards, cops, lawyers—and act out the play’s vignettes under the watchfully dry eye of director David Cromer. Heather Gilbert’s lighting augments Arnulfo Maldonado’s somber set, with its tiers of prison cells on the back wall. (Looking up at the higher floors, all you see is rows of closed doors.)
If I were going to get granular, I’d say that what the adaptation misses is the way that the film documentary touches at times—as well as in its very existence and shape—on the transformative power of storytelling. In prison, Yarris labored to become more literate, teaching himself new vocabulary words every day, including the fancy term triskaidekaphobic, which deals with fear of the number 13. Rather perversely, Ferrentino cuts this part; Nick cites the word incredulous instead, which makes nonsense of the play’s title. (The word thirteen is later shoehorned into a memory of childhood abuse, but the connection is flimsy.) A more important omission is the lesson that Yarris learned from the hundreds of books he read, with an emphasis on thrilling narratives, from dime-story mysteries to epic adventures by Homer and Rudyard Kipling. “With every new book, I found something wonderful about myself. I found myself,” he says. “I became comfortable with who I was, finally in life. And that’s when I met Jacki.” Ferrentino edits that out, too; in her rendering, the couple still connect over books, but it’s in the service of a meet-cute: She calls him out after he tries to pass off the long opening line of The Catcher in the Rye as his life story.
With adaptations, the question for me is always the same: What does it add? In this case, I feel much as I did about last year’s Good Night, and Good Luck. No, The Fear of 13 isn’t bad, and you can pay hundreds of dollars to see it onstage if you like. Or for free, anytime, you can watch the film and see Yarris himself tell the same story, in most of the same words, faster and more realistically and in greater detail; if you want, you can even watch him tell his own story in a different filmed account. Is the Broadway version worth the vastly higher price? To some, it may be. But that notion leaves me feeling a little—what’s the word?—incredulous.
The Fear of 13. James Earl Theatre (Broadway). By Lindsey Ferrentino. Directed by David Cromer. With Adrien Brody, Tessa Thompson, Ephraim Sykes, Eddie Cooper. Running time: 1hrs 50mins. No intermission.
Buy tickets to The Fear of 13: Broadway.com
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