Tessa is featured alongside co-star Adrien Brody and playwright of Fear of 13, Lindsey Ferrentino in the New York Times. I’ve added the two beautiful black and white portraits to the gallery, and you can read the interview below.
NEW YORK TIMES – In the autumn of 2024, the playwright Lindsey Ferrentino took a former convict named Nick Yarris to a preview performance of her new work, “The Fear of 13,” in London. The play, by turns harrowing, tragic and mordantly funny, dramatizes the 21 years that Yarris, portrayed onstage by Adrien Brody, spent on death row in Pennsylvania for a murder he did not commit.
Seeing his grueling prison ordeal unfolding before him in the theater, Yarris, now 64, was “audibly reacting louder than anyone else,” Ferrentino recalled, causing a neighboring audience member to ask him to keep it down. But a video that was shown after the curtain fell revealed that this was Yarris, the play’s subject, and “everyone nearby just sort of reached out and put their hands on him,” Ferrentino said. “No one had words — what do you say? — but they were all silently trying to hug him or put their hands on his back.”
“It was the greatest moment I’ve ever had in the theater,” she said.
The play, which had an eight-week, sold-out run at the Donmar Warehouse in London, received two Olivier Award nominations, for best new play and best actor for Brody. Now “The Fear of 13” has opened on Broadway, for a limited run at the James Earl Jones Theater. For its New York iteration, the play has changed considerably, with tweaks to the script; a larger cast of actors playing prison guards, inmates and other characters; a new director (David Cromer); and a new actress (Tessa Thompson) in the role of Jacki, a death-row volunteer who falls in love with Yarris.
