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Emilio Madrid At age 21, Nick Yarris was stopped during a routine traffic stop, arrested and sentenced to die for the rape and murder of a young wife and mother. Though Yarris did not commit this crime, he would spend the next 22 years of his life in confinement awaiting an execution date. Based on the documentary by David Sington, playwright Lindsey Ferrentino’s “The Fear of 13” is a deeply moving play about Yarris’ experience on death row, the woman who became his lifeline and his eventual exoneration after more than two decades behind bars. With Academy Award winner Adrien Brody and actress Tessa Thompson making their Broadway debuts, the play features some profound performances. However, it also feels tonally bumpy by the end. Directed by David Cromer, “The Fear of 13” opens in the bleak darkness of the death row, maximum security unit of Huntingdon Prison in Pennsylvania. Shrouded in steel, Arnulfo Maldonado’s scenic design looks almost medieval. Yarris (Brody) appears on stage, sitting on a single stool, donning a deep cranberry prison uniform. He is one of the 140 men in solitary confinement, sequestered in their cells for 23 hours every day. As Yarris recounts to Jacki Miles (Thompson), a volunteer for an abolitionist group, for his first two years on death row, speaking wasn’t allowed. According to the warden, “Dead men don’t speak.” Physically and verbally stifled, all of the men on the row are eager to speak to Jacki. For one hour each week, they chat with her about the abuses they’ve endured in prison and even the rumors they’ve heard surrounding prolific serial killer John Wayne Gacy’s penchant for KFC. However, it’s Yarris’ fantastical tales, one centering on the romance between two lovers, Wesley (Ephrim Sykes) and Butch (Michael Cavinder), who bring singing and talking to the death row unit and his own month-long escapade after escaping the penitentiary that reels Jacki in. Though she’s skeptical of his stories at first, she finds articles recounting Yarris’ jailbreak in the newspaper, and the pair begins an unlikely friendship which turns romantic. Despite his plight, Brody portrays Yarris as gregarious and thoughtful. Jacki, though plagued by her own misgivings, is pulled toward him. The duo shares a love of books and eventually begin talking over the phone after Yarris asks for Jacki’s number. She quickly becomes one of his only connections to the outside world. When Jacki learns that no traces of Yarris’ DNA were found on the victim or at the scene, she becomes his advocate and later on his wife. As the pair cling to one another for years, pushing for appeals and testing, all while dreaming of the life they could build together in the outside world, time slips away, showcasing the utter brutality and endless red tape embedded in the American penal system. Along with the ensemble who bellow out The Temptations’ “I Wish It Would Rain,” “My Girl” and “Just My Imagination,” portraying the incarcerated men, the guards and even the judges and lawyers, to the magnetic chemistry between Brody and Thompson, the show boasts powerful performances. However, because it toggles madly between tense horror and humor, “The Fear of 13” is tonally off. Additionally, cramming in Yarris’ entire life story, including a horrific childhood sexual assault to his drug-fueled teen years and eventual imprisonment in just under two hours, feels like the audience is rushed through the narrative instead of being allowed the proper time to absorb it. The show would have benefited from either a longer runtime or a shorter, more succinct production with stripped-back humor.
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