Interview: Nick Yarris Finds New Allies and a Broadway Spotlight in The Fear of 13

While in jail, Yarris made a desperate attempt to secure a lighter sentence by claiming he knew the rapist and murderer of Linda Craig, a local woman whose case he had read about in the newspaper. The suspect he identified was cleared, and investigators instead focused on Yarris himself. After forensic testing failed to exclude him, Yarris was charged with Craig’s murder, convicted in 1982, and sentenced to death, though he was ironically acquitted of the original traffic-stop charges.

Yarris spent 21 years behind bars, much of it on Death Row. In 1989, after learning about the emerging science of DNA testing, he became one of the first Pennsylvania Death Row inmates to seek post-conviction DNA testing. It took until 2003 for the evidence to conclusively exclude him from all biological material connected to Craig’s death, making him the 140th person in the United States exonerated through post-conviction DNA evidence. He was released in 2004.

Over the last two decades, Yarris has traveled the world as an author, speaker, and advocate, but freedom has hardly meant peace. He lives with chronic physical pain and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, a progressive brain disease linked to the repeated beatings he endured in prison. He has battled PTSD and homelessness and sustained injuries after being struck by a car last November.

But a bright spot has emerged through Lindsey Ferrentino’s Broadway play The Fear of 13, starring Adrien Brody and Tessa Thompson, adapted from the documentary about Yarris’s extraordinary journey. Brody plays Yarris himself, with Thompson as a prison volunteer who becomes his partner. Both actors, despite their international fame, have become close allies to the real-life Yarris, who doesn’t even have the words for what this experience truly means to him.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

What has this whole Broadway experience been like for you?
I’m the only human being walking on this planet with a stage play on Broadway in which the actors come out and hang out with me afterwards. I don’t want to get it wrong. So, I try very diligently to be humble. I have a routine. If I have a guest attend the play with me, I get the staff to make sure they’re taken up to the seat, and then I go stand at the back. I try to show respect for the people who took money out of their mouths to come to the play and to show them that they’re really the most important person that evening.

For me, it’s been a quest to find the correct measurement of humility, humbleness, and gratitude for everything that’s coming about, while I’m experiencing something that is so mind-blowing that I can’t ever put to word what it does to me at times.

Not everyone can say they’ve had a two-time Oscar winner play them.
Yeah, it’s kind of deep, in that I’ve watched a lot of healing come about for Adrien. He’s so close to his mother, Sylvia, and his father, who I spoke to at the Sardi’s revealing of his portrait. It’s eerie that they’re all so familiar to me, and it’s a wonderful connection to have with them.

And Tessa Thompson is an absolute grace. She gave me a present for my birthday, which is one of the five books that I ever had in my cell, The Prophet by Khalil Gibran. I had told her this beautiful story of when I was in Prague and how I read that book at sunset to the love of my life, and she remembered that story and went out and got me the book. It’s so touching that someone that doesn’t have to make the effort is so genuinely caring that they went out and got me a first edition copy of this book from 1923. I have it with me here in Los Angeles and I’m touched by that kind of connectivity that I’ve gotten from my experience. I’m learning that all the things I went through that led up to this day, I’d go back and do it all again.

When you watch Adrien play you and embody your younger self, does it feel like you’re watching your own life, or does it feel removed?
I’m not allowed to do that base perspective to myself after achieving critical self-thinking. I’m going to witness artists perform. It’s like I’m watching David Gilmour and Nick Mason perform “Dark Side of the Moon.” I’m watching the artistic side to see how it changes each night. Because my focus is on the artistic side of this, I spare myself the problems of having this affect you mentally.

The key thing is that Adrien isn’t mimicking me. He’s doing this rendition of the story through his own making. It only touches upon me in likeness because those were my words from the Fear of 13 documentary. He is doing Adrien Nicholas Brody, and it’s really deep.

I love that he has the introspective side come out when he’s doing the poetry and the soliloquy. The ending is so revealing because he emulates me when he’s talking about being incredulous that life could be this good, do you know what I mean? He’s touching upon me in that way, and I love that.

What will you remember about this moment?
It has been dreamlike beyond anything I thought it would be. It brought me the tenderness to help so many people that have come to experience the play with me. One of them was Michelle Murphy, who was convicted of her own child’s murder in Oklahoma [and was exonerated]. I brought her to the play. Tiana Broadnax, who just witnessed her husband’s execution in Texas a month ago, I brought her to the play. Every human being that has been damaged or hurt in my wheelhouse, I try to bring them through a process of seeing my best and worst moments onstage and then showing them how they can heal. I’m so proud of it.