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If the meat and potatoes of Death of a Salesman comes at too high a ticket cost, one needs venture only a few blocks south and a half-block east to get a (slightly) more affordable version of standard-issue Broadway fare. The Fear of 13, from playwright Lindsey Ferrentino, is so earnest and accessible one could almost mistake it for a filmed biopic of the sort that premieres in the fall with hopes of awards attention. Like those films, Ferrentino’s play is sturdy, dependable and mostly unremarkable.

The true story on which the play is based is certainly of note, one of all too many instances in the US of a person wrongfully imprisoned for decades. The Fear of 13 concerns Nick Yarris, who spent a troubled youth addicted to drugs and stealing cars before he was railroaded into a murder conviction, which came with a death sentence. Yarris maintained his innocence throughout his 22 years on death row, enlisting the help of various lawyers and a volunteer, Jackie Schaffer, whom he married while still incarcerated. Yarris was eventually exonerated based on DNA evidence and turned his hardship into a memoir and a documentary, which make up the narrative foundation of the play.

Ferrentino and director David Cromer work hard to make this linear story, largely confined to the cramped environs of a prison, into something grandly theatrical. Cromer, a Chicago director who rocketed to New York renown in the late aughts with his stunning productions of The Adding Machine and Our Town, employs a similar midcentury modernism here. Characters often stand in small pools of light, directly addressing the audience. Busier scenes are blocked in presentational tableaux. We are served a play and also, in a way, the idea of a play; there is something nearly Brechtian about the naked theatricality of the Fear of 13.

Which makes one wish that the text of the play was doing something more inventive. It is, instead, a fairly conventional mapping of Yarris’s years in prison, focusing particularly on his exchanges with Schaffer, here simply called Jacki. Through these dialogues, we learn the salient details of Yarris’s backstory, a recitation of the timeline that only briefly pauses for a moment of the sublime – particularly a musical interlude in which two prisoners in love sing to one another. Ferrentino’s writing is, at its best, crisp and propulsive. But when she tries at something more lyrical, like in the play’s over-egged final monologue, she quickly falls into vagueness and cliche.

She has also given the play a lopsided structure. There is a lot of table setting and preamble before Nick and Jacki begin their relationship, and then that portion is rushed – perhaps to keep the play at an intermissionless 110 minutes. We appropriately feel the despondency and brutal constrictions of Yarris’s prison life, but we don’t feel nearly enough of the enduring passion he and Jacki shared, which helped lift Yarris out of despair as he worked his way toward deliverance. In the play’s hurrying to its conclusion, Jacki is underwritten, becoming more plot device than equal partner.

Which is a shame, because she’s played with warmth and understatement by Tessa Thompson, a movie star who can sometimes be a little broad on film. The stage might be her ideal setting; she effortlessly fills the volume of the theater, casting a glow across Arnulfo Maldonado’s imposing set. Her co-star is two-time Oscar winner Adrien Brody, reprising his role after a London run in late 2024. He’s the hammier of the two, speaking in an unspecific New York-ese (the real Yarris has a softer Delaware county accent, familiar to fans of Mare of Easttown) and full of stringy, one-man-show energy. But he and Thompson complement each other well; Brody’s most affecting moments are when Yarris and Jacki are caught in a moment of intimacy.

When the rain starts pouring toward the end of the play, though, Brody swells to fit the hokey staginess of the moment. Yarris’s particular story is eventually flattened out into a more general consideration of life’s quotidian beauty, all that is taken for granted until one is, like Yarris, stolen away from the world. It’s a worthy enough sentiment, but one more wrenchingly and articulately rendered in, say, Our Town. One leaves the Fear of 13 certainly horrified by the injustice done to Yarris, and moved by his journey to freedom, but it’s a fleeting feeling. Ferrentino and Brody have not burrowed deep enough to make the play stick. It is polite theater that soothes rather than sears.