The Fear of 13
Opening Night: April 15, 2026
Theater: James Earl Jones Theatre
Website: thefearof13broadway.com
Nick’s got a story to tell you. About how a routine traffic stop turned into a conviction for murder. About how he spent the next 22 years on death row. About how he finally petitioned the court to ask not for an appeal—but for his execution date. And about what happened next…
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April 15, 2026
Ferrentino’s choice to make Nick look like he might be an unreliable narrator thus becomes bizarre; it certainly works against the clearer passions of the documentary. If you don’t know the back story, then the play’s irresolute (and then abandoned) hints that Nick might be untrustworthy create a certain slack tediousness. And if you do know that Yarris was (famously) exonerated, then they feel like time wasted. Ferrentino’s dramatic interpolations, particularly the wan attempt to expand Jacki’s character, sap the directness of the original account, and perhaps even harm it as advocacy.
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April 15, 2026
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.
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April 15, 2026
I had no such ambivalence viewing The Fear of 13, Lindsey Ferrentino’s stage adaptation, now at Broadway’s James Earl Jones Theatre. I knew it was bullshit within minutes of Adrien Brody pimp-rolling onstage, flailing his arms like an extra in a hip-hop music video. Telegraphing hoodlum-with-a-heart-of-gold while declining to explore the idiosyncrasies that make Yarris a compelling character, Brody is giving the kind of performance that should have never made it past the rehearsal room, one that unhelpfully raises questions beyond the scope of the play: If Nick grew up on the mean streets of Philadelphia, why does he talk like he’s from Canarsie? If there was a Tony Award for Fraudulent Performance by an A-lister in a Play, Brody would have it on lock with this head-scratching Broadway debut.
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April 15, 2026
“The Fear of 13” is deeply moving. Yet it falls short of being remarkable with uneven pacing and its ever-shifting tone. Translating a documentary into a Broadway production is no easy feat. Despite some bumps and more repetitive sequences, Brody and Thompson deliver outstanding performances. Yet, when it’s all said and done, the story may be better as a movie.
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April 15, 2026
Even in the harshest descriptions of the violence and almost unbelievably cruel twists of fate that Yarris endured (the DNA testing keeps getting accidentally mucked up), Brody lends him a vital indomitable spark. But he’s so enamored with that bravado, that of his character and his own, that he only glancingly finds a dimension beyond it. He was, as is the play itself, repeating a good story but not providing deeper insight, giving us a mythology without a deeper sense of a man.
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April 15, 2026
In his Broadway debut, Brody brings the same intensity and hangdog vulnerability that underscore his best film performances, and if his hip-hop Yo! MTV Raps street mannerisms seem an actorly affectation in flashback scenes set in 1970s Philly, he comes remarkably close to making Nick’s appeal at least somewhat credible (even when he’s recounting a kidnapping for laughs).
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April 15, 2026
Ferrentino struggles to synthesize the true story’s larger themes, so even if Brody has some affecting moments in the closing scenes, the play is flat, emotionally ineffectual. It’s a disappointment that two actors as gifted as Brody and Thompson should make their Broadway debuts in such a bland, poorly conceived vehicle. At close to two hours with no intermission, it numbs both the brain and the butt.
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One leaves the Fear of 13 certainly horrified by the injustice done to Yarris, and moved by his journey to freedom, but it’s a fleeting feeling. Ferrentino and Brody have not burrowed deep enough to make the play stick. It is polite theater that soothes rather than sears.
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April 15, 2026
Brody comports himself well enough. He is poised and relaxed, and the delicate, damaged spirit he brings to his heartbreaking films transitions smoothly to the theater. It’s just that “The Fear of 13,” as written, is a lifeless, stuffy and dutiful schlep through years of events, posing an insurmountable obstacle for any actor. What unfolds is little more than a polite novella of narration about a weighty topic: the criminal justice system.
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April 15, 2026
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.
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April 15, 2026
“The Fear of 13” was first seen at London’s Donmar Warehouse, where it got mixed reviews, but the show at the James Earl Jones Theatre is a new and very artful production from the longtime Chicago director David Cromer, who works here with his phenomenal lighting designer Heather Gilbert. Together, these two superb artists make much of Yarris constantly seeking the light, as Yarris searches for a way forward from the blackness of death row.
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Brody, who received an Olivier Award nomination for the London production, delivers a charismatic, movie star quality performance that effectively conveys the younger Nick’s drug-fueled foolishness as well as the older version’s despair and mordant humor. But his and Thompson’s hard-working efforts aren’t enough to compensate for the slackness of the writing which too often diverges into cutesiness.
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Always impeccable David Cromer directs the production, a dark one lighted by Heather Gilbert on Arnulfo Maldonado’s high but sometimes seemingly crushing set. The acting by the 12-member cast—most of those supporting coming and going as more than one character—is strong, lending that much more weight to the ominous proceedings. Special attention must be paid to Thompson, with wigmakers Rob Pickens and Katie Gell enhancing Jacki’s aging over close to two decades. With delicate firmness she creates a woman slowly worn down by the increasingly cruel circumstances. At the end, however, The Fear of 13 is Brody’s domain. Never offstage and often really as well as symbolically solitary, he presents a man fighting for his life until fight is drained from him. And then what seems miraculously restored to him. It’s restored, and yet at the last moments, he’s left wondering what’s left for him, what kind of future he faces. Right up to those final moments, Brody instills frayed dignity.
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Two-time Oscar winner Adrien Brody is notching another star turn as a real-life survivor in his Broadway debut. As Nick Yarris, a Pennsylvania man who wrongfully spent 22 years on death row and narrowly got out with his life, Brody’s unvarnished, sad-eyed charisma is effective in Lindsey Ferrentino’s The Fear of 13, a story where the stakes couldn’t be higher. But is it an emotional nail-biter on stage? Not so much. As written, Nick’s saga is earnest but dramatically static, and it’s difficult to point to a moment that lets Brody truly stand out.
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But the focus largely stays on Nick. How could it be otherwise, given Adrien Brody’s skill in embodying the storyteller’s gifts of passion, precision, and charm? Brody has won two Oscars for portraying intense characters of great resilience and endurance in the face of unimaginable brutality — Polish pianist Władysław Szpilman in The Pianist (2002) and as Hungarian architect László Tóth in The Brutalist (2024). But he has also exhibited a dry sense of humor in a series of Wes Anderson’s quirky comedies. He brings all this to bear in a performance that goes beyond the thrill of seeing a movie star’s first time on stage.
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April 15, 2026
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.
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