‘The Fear Of 13’ Broadway Review: Adrien Brody Stars In Dark Tale Of Justice So Very Long Delayed

Adrien Brody and Tessa Thompson make affecting Broadway debuts in The Fear of 13Lindsey Ferrentino’s based-on-a-true-story play about a falsely accused death row inmate and the woman who loves him from the other side of the bullet-proof glass.

Alternately intense and tender, Brody’s Olivier-winning performance, despite some choices that can feel a bit like strutting, elevates what in the end is an appalling yet sadly not uncommon wrongful conviction tale in which a man – a low-level Philadelphia car thief named Nick Yarris, at least as troubled as he is a troublemaker – lands a death sentence for a rape and murder we soon learn he didn’t commit (Ferrentino wastes little time on the did-he-or-didn’t-he question – he didn’t, or there wouldn’t be a play).

Based on a 2015 British documentary about Yarris by director David Sington, in which Yarris is the sole presence, relating his story to the camera, The Fear of 13 – more about the title later – expands the story to include other inmates, some standard-issue sadistic prison guards and, most importantly, a jailhouse volunteer who falls in love with the charismatic Nick despite her protestations to the audience that, yes, she’s aware of how this all looks and no, she’s not one of those women who fetishize the imprisoned.

Except, well, isn’t she? Ferrentino wants us to think otherwise, and the real-life inspiration for the character might have a convincing tale to tell, but the closest we get to any likelier explanation is a blatant bit of lampshading – that device of bluntly calling attention to a narrative’s implausibility or inconsistency in order to de-fang it. Jacki (sweetly played by Thompson, whose credits include the wildly popular Avengers franchise) assures us she’s no jailhouse groupie.

But until a mid-play reveal that Nick didn’t do it, Jacki must assume, or at least consider, that she’s being wooed by a man who brutally raped and murdered a young mother of two. She herself has seen the autopsy photos, she’s ready the newspaper clippings. No matter. “I am not that person,” she insists. And the play moves on.

Then there’s Lampshade #2: While The Fear of 13 has partnered with the Innocence Project, a volunteer organization that uses DNA to help exonerate the wrongfully convicted and combat racial bias in a system that disproportionately targets Black Americans, race, as a subject, remains defiantly absent from this play. “If I’m going to write about somebody,” Jacki says during one of her many phone calls with Nick, “it probably shouldn’t be a white guy.” Lampshade erected, she and Fear, once again, move on.

What Ferrentino and director Cromer get right though is conveying the absurdly, cruelly drawn-out grinding of justice’s wheels, or more accurately here, injustice’s wheels. Long years pass between appeals and responses and papers lost or burst open(!) in the mail. The passage of time is cleverly conveyed through a variety of devices, from the sitcoms on Jacki’s TV screen (Cheers gives way to Seinfeld) and the age of the (offstage) dog that Jacki hopes to someday share and raise with a freed Nick.

Still, as one judicial delay follows another, our very legitimate frustration with an inhumane legal system begins to feel like frustration with a narrative that mirrors Lucy, Charlie Brown and that ever-proffered football. At the reviewed performance, there seemed to be some exasperated audience “ughs” among intended dejected gasps.

Those pacing blips aren’t the only groaners. The depictions of the baton-wielding, pain-inflicting prison guards might well be accurate to Yarris’ testimony, but onstage they appear like so many outtakes from Cool Hand Luke. (A late-in-coming moment of grace for the most heinous of the guards is as wrong-headed as it is cringy). The jailhouse tropes extend to Nick’s fellow inmates who sing like angels. No, better, like Temptations.

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).

Still, when The Fear of 13 finally arrives at something close to Nick’s Rosebud revelation, we’re meant to connect the dots between past trauma and current predicament, and it is a tenuous connection at best, a possible cause for an effect we’ve been told repeatedly to distrust. The climactic scene, set amidst a downpour evocatively conveyed on the moody, spare, grid-like and often pitch-dark set (Arnulfo Maldonado is the scenic designer, with lighting design by Heather Gilbert), does provide a deeper meaning to the play’s title beyond the word – triskaidekaphobia – that Nick taught himself in prison (no spoilers), but if it’s meant, as it seems to be, to somehow explain the beginnings of outlaw behavior and character faults that got Nick in deeper water than he ever could have imagined, we’re left with the unsettling feeling that The Fear of 13 is asking the victim to shoulder at least a modicum of the blame that should fall entirely on a grossly unfair system, and there’s no justice in that.

Title: The Fear of 13
Venue: Broadway’s James Earl Jones Theater
Written By: Lindsey Ferrentino (Based on the documentary directed by David Sington)
Directed By: David Cromer
Cast: Adrien Brody, Tessa Thompson, Ephraim Sykes, Michael Cavinder, Eddie Cooper, Victor Cruz, Eboni Flowers, Joel Marsh Garland, Jared Wayne Gladly, Joe Joseph, Jeb Kreager, Ben Thompson
Running Time: 1 hr 50 min (no intermission)