How Lindsey Ferrentino Brought Adrien Brody to Broadway With The Fear of 13

Two-time Oscar winner Adrien Brody is making his Broadway debut in The Fear of 13, and audiences have playwright Lindsey Ferrentino to thank. It is her second Broadway show this season, following The Queen of Versailles, a musical about socialite Jackie Siegel.

Like The Queen of Versailles, Ferrentino drew on a documentary for The Fear of 13. This one is a 2015 film about Nick Yarris, who spent 22 years on death row for a crime he did not commit. He was released in 2004 after DNA evidence proved his innocence. The story opened Ferrentino's eyes to a subject she hadn't previously spent much time considering. "It's a privileged position to not have to think about death row on a daily basis," she says. She developed the play after forming a long friendship with Yarris.

Brody first played Yarris in the show’s 2024 premiere in London, where he earned an Olivier Award nomination. The Broadway cast also includes Tessa Thompson, making her stage debut.

The play begins performances March 19 at the James Earl Jones Theatre. Here, Ferrentino talks about what drew her to Yarris' story, why she does not consider the play to be an adaptation of the film and the one thing she had never let an actor do before collaborating with Brody.

This is the second documentary film you've adapted for the stage—what captivates you about the process?
I have always been attracted to true stories. During COVID, I went through a period of time where I was just more interested in the truth in general, and felt this weird sort of self-consciousness about making things up. So I was seeking out true stories that moved me. I do think it takes, as a writer, the same process to write original fiction versus telling someone's life story, because I tend to write with a lot of research anyway, and try to always start from a place of truth.

Why did this story in particular inspire you to write a play?
Nick's story was just so incredibly moving to me. Just the way he was able to articulate his own life experience, having lived in solitary confinement for 22 years, where his only company were the books that he was reading. He had this deeply theatrical way of articulating his own narrative that I felt, both in experience and in the way he talked about it, was unlike anything I'd ever heard before. His life has had more twists and turns in a way that, no matter how good of a writer you are, you would never be able to make it up. It is this sort of truth that's stranger than fiction. I think of this as an original play. It started with the documentary, because that is him on a stool telling his life story. But then I also got to know Nick. More than the memoir, it's from my experiences of getting to know Nick and my friendship with him over many years now, spending a lot of time with him both personally and also in an official interviewing capacity. The play is a bigger story than just Nick's. It's not just Nick's perspective on the world and the issues.

Talk to me about your relationship with Nick, and how it's developed as you bring the show to Broadway.
It started with texting regularly, then talking on the phone and me going out to L.A. to spend time with him. It has evolved into phone conversations and voice notes. He's a big texter. Every time you talk to Nick, there's always more narrative and more stories to be uncovered. It's our running joke that I can't talk to him anymore, because every time he says something that I wish I had room for in the play. But he's just a great resource, and has perspective—both on his experience and also on life itself—he has a life experience unlike most people. Because of that, and because of his deep ability to intellectualize and analyze it and think about it from a critical distance at this point, because now he's been out of prison as long as he was in prison, he is able to offer this completely unique and very human perspective. I think also the thing that people wouldn't expect from Nick is his deeply sharp, irreverent sense of humor, his gallows sense of humor about what he experienced. I am always interested as a playwright in deeply serious subjects, but that can be told in a tonally unexpected way. I feel like Nick's story just gives you that in spades. You would not expect coming to a play about death row for it to be funny and also a love story, and also an adventure story. But like life, people contain these multitudes.

Can you share how you found that balance between serious subject matter and romance when writing the play?
Jacki, in the documentary and also in talking with Nick, is a smaller part of the story. He was in for 22 years, and Jacki's relationship with Nick was nine of those years. But it was the part for me as a writer and as a person that I had the most questions about. To me, that was the big place where I could find myself within the story, and it felt like it would do the same for the audience. Jacki was a prison volunteer with this abolitionist group in Pittsburgh, who would go into prisons and visit with incarcerated individuals and ask to hear their story. She can get involved in advocacy work, if there's something to advocate for, but her main job is just to be a human being inside the system that's designed to erase humanity. That act of coming into a prison, saying, "I'm here as another person, regardless of your guilt or innocence, just to listen and witness and be here." I felt like that is what the theater does so well, in that every person buying a ticket is coming into a space and saying, "I'm here as a human being and a witness to this story." Anyone telling their life story, there's ups and downs and highs and lows, funny parts and sad parts, parts that break your heart, parts that are admirable and that you're ashamed of. Every person has that within them, and that is part of the advocacy of what Jacki does, and also the advocacy of the play, in that you're taking someone who's been assigned a number and making them a human being again.

And you've added ensemble characters as well—was your reasoning the same there?
Yeah. I think if I had adapted the documentary, it would be a one-man show. But in the writing of it, I had so many questions about the other people in his life: the people that he ran into when he escaped from prison, the other police officers, the prison guards, the people in the cell next to him, Jacki, this woman who comes to visit him, his relationship with his parents. The more I immersed myself in the story, the bigger and bigger it got. If I was wise, I probably would've done it as a one-man show, but it's now my biggest play with the biggest ensemble and the most scene changes. It's a huge epic, but I don't think you can tell Nick's story without it. It is a life and death story that begins in his childhood and works all the way up through the moment that he gets his freedom, and him as a person trying to trace back to the moment where his life took a turn that he didn't expect. Where the beginning of his story is, is the big question of the show.

Adrien Brody is a huge get. When did he come on board, and why is he the right person for the part?
I had a movie that I'm writing and directing that I had thought of Adrien for, and he liked the script enough to take a meeting with me. I had finished a draft of the play, and I knew I had this meeting with him. My sort of secret, not-so-subtle hustler brain—what Adrien and I jokingly say is I did a bait and switch on him. He took the meeting about the movie and then I really pushed the play on him. It was before we had a director, it was before we had a London production. I had this instinct that they shared the same sensibilities, that they had the same contradictions as people. Nick growing up in Philly, Adrien growing up in Queens, both of them being deeply sensitive and intellectual, but street smart and savvy in the same ways. They shared a sharpness and sense of humor.

How did you react when he agreed?
It's the greatest thing that's ever happened to me in the world, that he read and liked the play enough to do it. Because he was not even looking to do a play. He had not done a play as an adult. He had done theater when he was a kid, but theater was not on his agenda at the time. It's not like he was one of these actors reading and looking for a play. It was a total shot in the dark, but he responded to it. And then in the years of working on the play together... It's Nick's story, and it's my take on Nick's story, and then it's also, I would say, Adrien's, in that we've been able to work so closely and I've been able to tailor it exactly towards his voice and sensibilities.

Are there any examples you can share of changes that were made to shape the character around Adrien?
Oh, my God. It's every line on every page. I don't think I've ever had this with an actor, where I trust his taste and sense of truth as much, if not more so, than my own. He'll be able to just read the line, and if it sounds not truthful or doesn't sit exactly in his voice, we'll look at each other and know that that's the case and then tailor it exactly. We joke that he's added a lot of yos, or he adds the word ass after things, like smug-ass or slow-ass. Sometimes they're big ideas, but sometimes they can be these really tiny vernacular specificities that help it feel not like an actor reading a role, but completely in his body and in his voice. I can't say enough good things about working with him. There's also this letter that Nick writes to the judge asking for his execution date. We didn't have that actual copy of what the letter said, so that moment in particular was a lot of Adrien and I batting ideas back and forth of what we thought the letter would be. And I never do this with an actor, but I let him take the first pass on what the letter would be, so that he has this deeply personal thing for himself in the middle of the play.

Now that it's coming to Broadway, what drew you to Tessa Thompson for the role of Jacki?
What doesn't draw you to Tessa Thompson? Because of the structure of that role and the way the play is structured, that character does a lot of listening in the first half of the play. The audience doesn't really know if you're going to ever actually get inside that person. You do eventually. But that character in the beginning is sort of a mystery, in that she's coming in and just asking these men about their life experiences. I think what Tessa has brought to that half of the play is something that I, as the writer, had not even been able to anticipate. She's so alive, she's so present and vulnerable, and her act of listening is not passive at all. She's fascinating to watch, even when she's taking in these stories. She's built this really beautiful character arc, up until the point in which that character gets to actually turn out to the audience and speak their truth, and tell the audience exactly who they are and where they're coming from. That is structured into the play to happen a little bit later than maybe normally, so that we're meeting her like the prisoners are meeting her. What she's been able to bring to even that part of the play has been so extraordinary. She also, in the way that I'm able to work with Adrien, has incredibly strong opinions and beautiful, brilliant points of view on her character that we've been constantly rewriting and incorporating.

Will the Broadway production look a lot different from the London staging?
Yeah, there's a lot of changes. It's a new director, it's all new designers, it's a completely American team who all have their own relationship with the carceral system in a way that perhaps the London production, as beautiful as it was, didn't have that personal relationship with the American prison system. I think there's been more of a focus in the rewrites on the world of the prison and making sure that it's completely accurate to Nick's experience in the prison, and this prison system. That's the great joy for me of being a playwright, is being in the rehearsal room and tailoring it to whatever cast is in it. Not just Tessa and Adrien, the whole ensemble of new actors to the material, who all have had a voice in shaping this production.

What excites you about working with Tony-winning director David Cromer?
This is bucket list for me. When I was 17 and first moved to New York to go to school, the first thing I saw was his production of Our Town. I saw it five times. Like a lunatic, I just kept going back and bringing everyone I knew. I don't think I've done that with any other show I've seen where I just kept going. I have thought about his version of Our Town every time I sit down to write something new. I definitely was thinking about it when I was writing this play and the way that I pictured it quite spare. So much of the production and the settings are in a language similar to how he did that show. The fact that he's directing it, I feel so relaxed in the rehearsal room, because I totally trust his vision and his understanding of tone. He trusts the language in a way that's really beautiful. He knows when a moment should be simple and language-based, versus when it needs a lot of staging or sound support. I've loved everything he's ever directed, so to be doing my first play on Broadway with him is a dream come true.

In what ways have the play and your relationship with Nick changed your perspective on life?
I mean, how could it not? When I'm writing something, I try to find one line that I keep on my desktop as the guiding idea or theme behind the show. The thing that Nick always talks about—and this particular line is in the documentary, but I kept it—is what he said about how time passes. It felt like the most profound idea to take away for me just as a person, but also became this guiding structural idea for the play. Sometimes years slip by without noticing in the play. Sometimes one scene will happen in real time and be agonizingly slow. And then suddenly months are going by, then a year might pass, then a few years go by, and then you sit in a day for a really long time. The different ways that time functions and everything in prison is measured on a timetable. There's the hour that you're allowed outside. There's the hour that you're allowed food. There's the hour that you're allowed to speak to someone, or the hour you're allowed a visit or a phone call. Everything is punctuated. The guards will come in and say, "Time," when your time is up. So it's this constant awareness of a ticking clock, and also when you're on death row with your execution date hanging over, it's this constant awareness of a different type of ticking clock. His personal awareness of time and the way it moves is the biggest idea certainly in the play, and definitely in what I took away from knowing Nick.

Watching the play in rehearsal, what stays with you?
What's so beautiful about theater and why I love seeing theater, especially about these big issues, is that you can take an issue like death row and personalize it; take these big systems and find one tiny human story within. I hope in the way that Nick's story awakened me as a person to this blind spot in my own politics about the criminal legal system and death row, that it will do the same for an audience. That it takes these overwhelming numbers—there's over 2,000 people on death row in this country right now. What can you do with that? What storytelling can do, and hopefully what Nick's story will do, is reduce it to its most honest and human form and make it accessible, so that when you leave the theater and maybe go vote on these issues, you think of one person's story rather than this giant number. I feel like Nick's story just reaches through those numbers. It certainly did for me.

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