Playwright Lindsey Ferrentino’s visceral writing finds the ordinary in extraordinary people

Working with Kim Kardashian wasn’t on Lindsey Ferrentino’s “dance card,” the playwright opined in a recent social media post. And it’s true, at first glance the collaboration might jar. But the pair have found common ground on the subject of prison reform, leading Kardashian to come onboard and produce Ferrentino’s latest Broadway production, The Fear of 13, which tells the true story of an American man who spent 22 years on death row for a murder he did not commit.

Raised in South Florida, Ferrentino is the daughter of a former X-ray technician father who made the unusual transition to stand-up comedy and magic shows, at one stage touring alongside Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. At 17, she chose the age-old migration path, landing in New York to pursue acting. Before long, she found herself enrolled at Yale University majoring in playwriting and screenwriting. Success came quickly. In her third year, Ferrentino wrote Ugly Lies the Bone, about an Afghanistan war veteran returning home to Florida, badly injured and consumed with what she’s seen. That play was scooped up by a New York City theater with Mamie Gummer in the lead, later transferring to the National Theatre in London. A golden ticket for any burgeoning dramatist.

The ideas kept coming and Ferrentino continued to write. Her pen is empathetic and shrewd, undulating between finding the extraordinary amid the ordinary and then turning that on its head. It was this unflinching curiosity that buoyed last year’s big-swing Queen of Versailles musical adaptation, reuniting Kristin Chenoweth with Wicked composer Stephen Schwartz. Also, Ferrentino’s Broadway debut, Queen of Versailles offered the writer “a full-circle moment,” opening 20 years after she first arrived in Manhattan. “Right now, I’m writing about a lot of people who have had extraordinary lives,” she says. “So, in those stories, you’re trying to find the ordinary that people can connect to in these extraordinary lives.”

Remarkably, that was the entry point for Ferrentino’s latest Broadway production, starring Tessa Thompson and two-time Academy Award-winner Adrien Brody. The Fear of 13 is based on David Sington’s 2015 documentary of the same name, confronting the true story of Nick Yarris, who spent 22 years wrongfully imprisoned and on death row for murder, rape, and abduction before being exonerated in 2003. “Nick has an extraordinary story,” says Ferrentino. “But you try to find the most ordinary points of access, love and heartbreak and letting go. It wasn’t just his theatrical way of storytelling,” she continues. “It was the way that he was able to talk about these deep traumas in his life, in this really human way. And I found it just very universal, even though the specifics of his situation are obviously so drastically different from my life.”

It’s consuming and confrontational subject matter. Before arriving in New York, The Fear of 13 premiered at London’s Donmar Warehouse in October 2024 (earning Brody an Olivier nomination). “It was a rebuild,” Ferrentino says. “It wasn’t just a straight transfer.” Unlike the UK, where the death penalty has been abolished since 1969, in America, the story resonates differently. “Everyone has their own relationship with knowing someone who’s been inside or having visited prisons. There’s a different level of knowingness on the part of the audience – that they’re complicit in creating a culture in a country where stories like Nick’s exist.”