Theatre | The Guardian: The rehearsal space for the Donmar Warehouse theatre is a scruffy, gymnasium-scale, subterranean cavern in Covent Garden. Strewn around, on Monday morning last week, are some telltale signs of stressful, long days: scrunched-up packs of bourbon biscuits and custard creams, and scattered pages of heavily inked script; also, intriguingly, four (empty) boxes of heavy-duty handcuffs. Dominating the room is a makeshift stage that looks like a boxing ring without ropes and measures 3.5 metres by 3.2 metres, almost the exact dimensions of a cell on death row.
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I’m amazed that Yarris is able to have so positive and healthy an outlook on life after everything he’s been through. The fact that there are so many death row cases that have been overturned or later found to be innocent––really just the fact that it’s a nonzero number at all––is terrifying. Especially in this case, when it’s clear that Yarris was just trying to reduce his sentence and had no connection to the murder he was accused of. The system is designed to take any lying or misdirection as guilt, but this doesn’t account for the desperate circumstances that prisoners are already in. It speaks to the transformative power of theatre that someone looked at this story and thought, yeah, that has to be a play, and a small but prestigious venue like the Donmar Warehouse is the perfect place to do it.
When I think about why I chose this career, I think about the importance of storytelling, and how deeply a well told story can affect the world. This play is the perfect example of that type of well told story. The flaws in the criminal justice system is, in my opinion, one of the premiere issues that haunts the western world, especially America. Powerful stories like these are small, but significant, steps towards increasing society's understanding and empathy for the incarcerated, and taking the time to use real stories and tell them well is the most important thing we, as storytellers, can do to be a part of that. Yarris' story, as horrific as it is, is extremely common, especially across racial lines. It is inspiring to see not only Yarris getting his story told, but the producers and actors in this piece taking the time to do his story justice.
Plays about dark tragedies based or inspired by real-life are a hard genre to pull off balancing respecting the real victims, dealing with actors and crew member’s mental health portraying/witnessing injustice and violence day after day. I’ve seen Brody in The Pianist and can imagine he’s very good at portraying Yarris. It’s cool Yarris and Brody got to interact and see what became of his story. It makes me think of working on Gloria and how actors and crew have found a way to separate reality from the world of the play by watching when to use the character names and when to use the actor’s real names when discussing violent and traumatic moments in the show. Witnessing horrific staged events day after day can be difficult to remember how to regulate your thoughts between watching the play and trying to work on it form a production point of view.
What people don’t talk about enough is the disparity between how the prison system is portrayed in media versus how it is in real life. It’s a less known fact that many prisons are privatized and stay in business by keeping occupancy above a certain percent. It’s always heartbreaking when I hear about people who are wrongfully convicted of crimes and forced into prison sentences. It’s horrible that Yarris was so traumatized by what he experienced behind bars that he wanted execution. Bringing trauma into art is a good way to process experiences and understand how they affected us as people while also helping to bring insight into the systems that cause so much pain to so many people.
This story is profound. It’s incredible how such an interesting and existential story has made its way to the stage. Nick Yarris’s chance chain of cause and effect lends itself beautifully to be told. The recreation of a death roll cell sets the scene for the play, The Fear of 13, as a backdrop for trauma incitiing and throughout his 22 years on death row. Yarris recounts his experience with a distinct sense of derealization, then continues to describe his close encounters with death - an irony considering his existence on the precipice for a significant portion of his life. The article describes exactly how Adrien Brody’s duality as a person and an actor allows him to be the singular talent able to authentically portray Nick Yarris in all his multitudes and facets shown in this play. Brody hadn’t acted on stage for years, but the script moved him to sign on within just a week.
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