The latest film-to-stage adaptation to land on Broadway is a curious fact-based yarn about a Pennsylvania man unjustly convicted of a brutal rape and murder who sat on death row for two decades before he was exonerated thanks to DNA evidence. The basis for The Fear of 13 is a 2015 documentary that stands out by shunning the usual rogues’ gallery of interviews for a single talking head: Nick Yarris, a compellingly chatty fellow from outside Philadelphia who escaped execution and relates his tragic life story with mesmerizing skill even as you constantly question the authenticity of some of his details.
Adrien Brody, in his Broadway debut, strikes a seductively confident and squirrely pose as Nick. He walks us through his teenage years committing petty crimes and abusing drugs, his fateful arrest at age 20 (for allegedly assaulting a police officer while high on meth), his misguided attempt to mitigate his legal troubles by fingering a rival low-level criminal for the much-publicized rape and murder of a local woman, his subsequent conviction for that crime despite a purely circumstantial case.
Unlike in the documentary, the play adds other voices — a cast of 12 that’s not only large enough to staff a musical but repeatedly breaks out into four-part harmonies as a soulful choir of inmates. (Hamilton and Ain’t Too Proud alum Ephraim Sykes is a vocal standout despite limited stage time.) But this remains a very talky, exposition-heavy narrative that gets fuzzy whenever the spotlight shifts to somebody other than Nick. We meet a poetry-reading grad student who visits the prison as part of a volunteer program and finds herself drawn into the web of Nick’s yarn-spinning and improbably falls in love with him and agrees to marry him. Tessa Thompson imbues this woman, based on a real individual, with as much authenticity as can be mustered for a character who barely exists in the show outside the prison’s visiting room. But despite Thompson’s best efforts, her character remains an enigma — or worse, the cliché of a woman all too easily swayed by a master manipulator.
Lindsey Ferrentino, who adapted another problematic big-screen documentary earlier this season with the bloated musical The Queen of Versailles, stumbles as she tries to open the story up beyond Nick’s blinkered point of view. In addition to Thompson’s wafer-thin love interest, we get a panoply of figures from the legal system who seem to vie with each other for cruelty, incompetence, or callous institutional indifference. There are the bumbling cops who first arrested him (and later allow him to escape prison for a month), the guards who deliver beat-downs on prisoners with impunity, the court-appointed attorney (Victor Cruz) who declares his lack of sympathy at the outset, and the judge (Eddie Cooper) who only suspends his anti-defendant bias when Nick has apparently exhausted his appeals and asks to be executed. When the widower of the slain woman weepily testifies in court, his words are treated as just another attempt to emotionally manipulate the jury into convicting.
From Nick’s point of view, that may be the case. But the man lost his wife in a truly horrific crime that this play barely acknowledges. That’s not to diminish the injustice of Nick’s experience or the validity of the Innocence Project and like-minded efforts causes. You don’t need to be a Boy Scout with a spotless record to be wrongfully convicted of an unforgivable crime. But you can also make a compelling case against capital punishment without stacking the deck for a guy like Nick in such a sweeping way. Ferrentino and director David Cromer bend over backward to present Nick in the best possible light at every turn, even delivering a shocking revelation about childhood abuse just before the final curtain. Inconvenient facts are easily dismissed or ignored — like the armed robbery and false imprisonment he committed during his one month as a fugitive in Florida. We never even discover the meaning of the show’s title, a nod to Nick’s prison-birthed enthusiasm for reading and learning 50-cent words like triskaidekaphobia.
With his lanky frame and perpetually furrowed brow, Brody seems to bask in an almost constant spotlight — a beacon that slices the enveloping darkness of Arnulfo Maldonado’s set design, with a three-story prison block on the upstage wall. (Lighting by Heather Gilbert.) The actor (who originated the role in London in 2014) never lingers too long in any one place, and that’s the genius of his performance. He conveys the restless energy of a man who’s always searching for another angle, a new avenue to pursue in his quest for justice and personal redemption. He’s the compelling heart and soul of The Fear of 13. ★★★☆☆
THE FEAR OF 13
James Earl Jones Theatre, Broadway
Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes (with no intermission)
Tickets on sale through July 12 for $58 to $447