The Fear of 13 (4*)

This injustices-of-incarceration love story, based on a 2015 documentary, begins with a welcome jolt:  a burly guard walks on to the dimly lit stage to announce forcefully the rules of Death Row: no cell phone use during the performance, no late seating, no unwrapping candies.  It gets a laugh even if the audience remains less compliant than the inmates.

The Fear of 13 takes a while to get going with a surprisingly musical cast assuming multiple roles as various members of the criminal justice system, types we've all met before under conditions we'd mostly prefer to ignore whether or not we oppose the death penalty.  Nick Yarris wasn't allowed to speak for years in a Pennsylvania maximum security prison; he's resigned to his fate until Jacki Miles, a naive volunteer who writes poetry, begins her visits. A spark between them ignites early, when Nick makes an allusion to David Copperfield which turns out later to have been a "move"; Jacki gently points out that he's actually referring to A Catcher in the Rye.  Their relationship builds slowly--so slowly that I must have drifted off during the discussion of Nick's vocabulary, absorbed from the thousand books he's read in the prison library--which accounts for the play's title and tragic vibe.

Tessa Thompson seems perfectly cast from the outset--who wouldn't fall in love with a woman as beautiful, smart and kind as she?--but it took a while for Adrien Brody's performance to accumulate power as a man whose only reason to live has been snatched away by mutual, mature consent. During the final 30 minutes, he floods the stage with restrained emotion while unlocking a childhood memory that shows how unlucky he has been from the very beginning. When it rains, it pours.  Only a bias against garrulous movie stars can explain Brody's Tony snub.

Kudos to playwright Lindsey Ferrentino for mining the dramatic potential of David Sington's political advocacy (the ceaseless, casual cruelty of corrections personnel and the capriciousness of judges are especially rich veins); to director David Kromer for building to an unforgettably devastating crescendo; and to Heather Gilbert, who illuminates the play's subsuming darkness with pinpoints of hopeful light.