Scott Klavan: Trial & Error

TRIAL & ERROR: A joint review of Giant and The Fear of 13

Giant

By Mark Rosenblatt

Directed by Nicholas Hytner

Broadway, Music Box Theater

April 16, 2026

The Fear Of 13

By Lindsey Ferrentino

Directed by David Cromer

Broadway, James Earl Jones Theater

April 23, 2026

Reviewed by Scott Klavan

Wrongdoing, social, religious, and legal, are at the center of two new plays on Broadway this season, Giant and The Fear Of 13.  Both raise bold questions about the darkness of human behavior, guilt, and innocence, and both dramatize their tales with provocative success, as well as occasional lapses of storytelling and thematic clarity. But the very presence of both shows on prominent stages can only be looked at as encouraging in a cultural atmosphere that often hides from controversy in boilerplate bromides and rank commercialism.

Giant is a new British play by, amazingly, a first-time playwright, Mark Rosenblatt. Based on actual events, it won the 2024 Olivier Award for Best New Play, and its lead John Lithgow won for Best Actor, and Elliot Levey for Best Supporting Actor. Its lead character is famed author Roald Dahl (Lithgow), who, in 1983, was embroiled in a scandal after a review he wrote about the photo book God Cried, concerning the Israel-Lebanon War, contained harsh opinions towards Israel and Jews. The plot revolves around Dahl, overseeing a renovation at his country house outside London with younger fiancée “Liccy” Crosland (Rachel Stirling), and British publisher Tom Maschler (Levey), receiving a visit from Jessie Stone (Aya Cash) a representative of his American publisher Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. There have been outcries from the media and Jewish groups about Dahl’s review, and Stone is there to convey the publisher’s worries that the writer’s reputation, and sales of his upcoming novel The Witches, will be irrevocably damaged if he doesn’t make a public conciliatory statement.

Dahl, a former WWII RAF flying ace, renowned for his ingenious and influential children’s books, including James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, is an obstinate and blunt man, and initially, he angrily rejects Stone’s request. Stone, herself Jewish, the mother of a now-teenaged son who has always loved Dahl’s work, is direct about the importance of an apology from him; Maschler, a Jew who escaped Nazi Germany as a child, but now maintains a diplomatic neutrality towards Israel, adjures her to soften her tone. The story becomes a conflict between Dahl’s refusal to accept the claim that he is anti-semitic, defending his accusation that Israel’s killing of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon has made them as bad as Nazi oppressors, as sincere criticism rather than bigotry; and Stone’s belief that Israel, as a sovereign country, has a right to protect its land and people, and that Dahl doesn’t see Jews as individuals separate from their government’s actions but merely has blind hatred for them as a group.

The first act of Giant is highly successful, with Lithgow’s performance assured, biting, and keenly observed. Now 80, a veteran of 25 Broadway plays, including M. Butterfly and All My Sons, as well as many films and TV shows, Lithgow captures Dahl’s head-on conceited fearlessness, his own brand of self-righteousness, piercing intelligence and sensitivity.  As the country house group tries to find a middle ground between Dahl and Stone, talented playwright Rosenblatt does exhibit some technical inexperience: trouble justifying the dutiful Aristotelian structure, dubious entrances and exits of characters in Dahl’s home under construction, etc. But he offers along with his excellent premise a convincing portrait of elite high-achieving people who veer between an affluent politesse and the socioeconomic/religious competition, condescension and disgust hiding barely beneath it. Stone’s speech at the end of Act I defending Israel’s right to exist and fight its enemies, is rousing and heartfelt, garnering loud applause from the audience before intermission.

The second act of Giant slows down, however, and, after an effective sequence where Dahl accuses his colleague Maschler of cowardly adaptability in separating himself from his own Jewish identity, the purpose of the latter half becomes obscure, just a retread of Act I’s issues. First, the play seems to assume that the validity of the charge of Dahl’s anti-semitism is a mystery, the certainty of which needs to be confirmed in the later parts of the play. But, in the opening moments of the piece, it is obvious from Dahl’s statements and behavior towards Stone that he is a bigot, so any dramatic tension there has dissipated. Next, and more important, the second act fails to take us deeper into the origin of Dahl’s hatred of Jews, and by extension, bigotry as a human trait that everyone, including the audience, encounters both inside and outside themselves throughout their life. We have to ask and examine: why was Dahl a bigot?  Dahl’s final, purposely incriminating phone interview with the New York Times, essentially outing himself as an anti-semite, is compelling, but why does he do it? All the play offers is a short, fairly contrived scene with Dahl and local friend Wally (David Manis) who exhorts him to reject being bossed around by others and stand up for himself as he has always done. It seems that’s the reason Dahl confesses on the phone: pig-headedness. But it’s not good enough. The tools were there, in the text, and lead character’s history, to use in a deeper dramatization of an ancient, pivotal human concern, but the author doesn’t fully utilize them. Dahl’s traumatic past as an RAF flyer, several tragedies involving his family, are mentioned in passing by Dahl and others in his disputations with Stone. But they are never clearly linked with his later hatred of an entire race of people.

On the phone, Dahl briefly and bitterly says that Jews think of themselves as the only people who suffer, that they have co-opted all the pain—and empathy—in the world. That kind of primal jealousy is magnetic and different; that is interesting. But the author and director, the accomplished Nicholas Hytner, former director of Britain’s National Theatre, don’t emphasize it, or emphasize it enough, anyway, tiptoeing around the edges. We as audience are only left with a portrait of a man as a bum, a play that might be sub-titled Giant: Story of a Jerk. This minimizes the question of bigotry and takes the audience off the hook. Giant, like Hamlet, Death of a Salesman, all other daring, meaningful plays focused on a problematic lead, can’t ultimately be about the man on stage, but the one in your seat: you. If Roald Dahl is just a mean kook, then we can chalk him off, and, unchallenged ourselves, go out and relaxedly have a drink after the show—or as the annoying stranger sitting next to me in our crunched too-small seats in the venerable Music Box Theater on Broadway, take out and look at his phone five or six times during the second act, losing interest in a play that should have drawn him out of himself, into himself.   

Giant is dominated by a rational argument between Stone and Dahl about Israel’s behavior in war, one that, of course, continues today, in the current battles in the Middle-East. But a rational argument has two sides, both of which can conceivably be argued successfully. In this particular rational argument, bigots can hide their hatred behind considered disagreements about Israel’s conduct; in that argument, Jews can lose and haters walk away unscathed. It is the irrationality of anti-semitism that is deeper, more threatening, contagious, and so frustrating.  Despite playwright Rosenblatt’s pointed preference for Stone’s support of Israel, the subconscious need for people to hate Jews, embodied by Dahl, is left buried. The second act of the play could have really delved into the writer’s past-life, where huge victories were offset by shocking tribulations. During the War, Dahl crashed into the desert in Libya, resulting in a serious concussion, temporary blindness, and a stay of six months in the hospital; in 1960, his infant son with then-wife, actress Patricia Neal, was hit by a taxi in NYC and developed a brain injury; in 1962, their daughter died at seven of measles encephalitis; then, Neal herself had a series of debilitating strokes. This list doesn’t include Dahl’s own childhood, during which his sister died at seven and his father several weeks after that; Dahl was three at the time. These facts are raced through on stage and my bet would be that audiences, particularly current American ones, barely familiar with them to begin with, fail to take them all in.  

The “giant” of the title is not a big man who ultimately reacts as a small, childish one, as stated in the piece. The “Giant” is really the Injustice that Dahl, and all of us, suffer, that can’t be explained or even ameliorated. (Dahl used giants as characters in his stories and books.) That intolerable unfairness, and the guilt and sense of failure that invariably accompanies our victimization by it, leads people to find a Scapegoat, most often the Jews, to answer for all the anguish of their earthly lives. In classic/classical examples, from ancient Christians blaming Jews as the first cause of all wrong, for their alleged killing of Christ, to Hitler’s holding the Jews responsible for Germany’s loss of World War I and the inequities of the Treaty of Versailles aftertheir surrender- this strategy has worked as a pretty good motivator. 

In society, and culture, anti-semites in politics, media, on the street where you live, are still explicitly or implicitly supported in their fixed judgment of Jews as less than full humans, the Jewish religion as less than fully equal to Christianity, Islam, et al. We sidestep or flat deny the uncomfortable moral obligation of haters to consider themselves rather than the Other. This acceptance of, the need for, bigotry, produces, even today, in our so-called progressive and “correct” modern age, commonplace atrocities, where civilians are massacred in Israel, synagogues are burned in Europe, and Jews beaten on the streets of 2026 New York City, as well as subtler forms of discrimination, and the populace at large responds either with outspoken approval, or a secret shrug. The wheel turns, ending up back at the beginning.

Giant certainly gives it an erudite, honest, thoughtful try and that is admirable. Its story of Roald Dahl does more to tackle tough stuff than most plays currently on stage, for sure. But the burning issue of the show fades. By the time we rise for the obligatory standing ovation, applauding, perhaps, our own strength for sitting through the show, the avoidance of our self-reflection, it has been snuffed out. 

The Fear of 13, by contrast, is a new play by an American writer, Lindsey Ferrentino, who has had several plays Off-Broadway, and wrote the book for a recent Broadway musical, The Queen of Versailles, which was a high-profile failure last year.  But the piece is also adapted from a real-life story, about Nick Yarris, falsely sent to Death Row for murder in the ‘80s, and, too, originated in 2024 England, this time at the Donmar Warehouse, directed by Justin Martin, starring Adrien Brody as Nick. There, it received two Olivier nominations, for Best Play and Lead Actor. In New York, the script was revised, and direction taken over by David Cromer, the prolific force behind plays and musicals such as Dead Outlaw, Good Night, and Good Luck, and Prayer for the French Republic; Brody returns as the lead. In place of the intellectual sophisticated wordplay, high-toned attitudes and upper class interplay of Giant, The Fear of 13 features unadorned working class language, emotional, earthy acting, and a staging that is simple yet imaginative and surprising; the result is a show that is thoroughly involving and affecting.

The story of Nick Yarris was first presented in his own memoir, then a 2015 British documentary, directed by David Sington. (For the record, The Queen of Versailles was also based on a documentary.) In the play, performed as a 110-minute one act, we see the volatile inmates of a prison’s Death Row in 1981 visited by Jacki Miles (Tessa Thompson) a well-meaning volunteer and poet who talks to the men for an hour a week. Jacki is drawn to inmate Nick (Brody), a sharp-tongued fellow from Philadelphia, sentenced to death for the murder of a woman. Gradually, Jacki takes to visiting with Nick by himself and the two develop a rapport; she brings Nick, who has become an avid reader in jail, new books, including Nabokov, and War & Peace. As he comes to trust her, he tells personal stories, including how, taken out of his cell and escorted to court for his appeal, he escaped and was on the run for weeks. Jacki, unsure whether Nick’s outlandish tale is a lie, researches it and learns it is true. Nick then reveals- acts out-the facts of his case: his troubled childhood leading to boosting cars and drug use as a teen, and an arrest for assaulting a policeman, possibly resulting in years behind bars. Young Nick, overly confident of his persuasive skills, comes up with the ruse of falsely claiming to know the culprit of a recent Philadelphia murder; he trades this info for a lighter sentence. But this backfires and Nick himself is charged with the killing. After a rushed trial, where virtually no evidence is presented against him, the innocent Nick is convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Returning to ‘80s Death Row, Nick and Jacki fall for each other and are able to marry.  In 1989, the use of DNA becomes ubiquitous, and she helps him on a years-long, agonizing fight for exoneration.

Cromer and his tech team- scenic designer Arnulfo Maldonado, lighting’s Heather Gilbert, sound’s Lee Kinney, et al- wring every moment of truthful behavior, pathos, excitement, humor, out of a script that is fairly spare and basic. Death Row is lit lowly but then suddenly illuminated brightly and garishly, then transformed by quick intro of just table and chairs into a courtroom or police station; when the theatrical pattern seems established, they break it by bringing in a full pawn shop during Nick’s escape, or Jacki’s suburban apartment where she calls him on the phone.  This keeps us off-balance, mirroring the uncertainty of Nick’s prison existence, his desperate hope for freedom, the fragile nature of his romance with Jacki.

Theater is a physical art form; it’s not a book, or news article, read in your head. The audience shouldn’t see words on a page, as it were, but fellow human beings believably feeling and doing things. A play’s director, cast and tech ideally create an in-the-moment, active, visceral, imaginary experience. This is always hard to do well, but The Fear Of 13 does it, following the time-honored practice with integrity and craftmanship. Yes, the play is 10-15 mins. too long, but what could have been routine and banal- a half-hearted theater version of the doc, a mere replication of TV’s Dateline true crime episodes, a moralistic sermon for better prisons and legal representation – is here, dynamic, genuine, specific, expressive, entertaining; an immersive theatrical portrait of Life.

The actors are uniformly brilliant, with two-time Academy Award winner Brody and Thompson, known for Marvel and Creed films, both making their Broadway debuts, matched in sensitivity and grit. In artistry, Brody’s Nick is the equal of Lithgow’s Dahl, but the characters are opposites: Nick is self-educated, warm, open, raucous, modest, mischievous. Special praise must be given to the ensemble group playing prisoners and guards, doubling in other roles, including Michael Cavinder, Eddie Cooper, Victor Cruz, Joel Marsh Garland, Jeb Kreager, and Ephraim Sykes.  Scenes of the men singing in jail, another surprise, are particularly expert and moving. A shouted opening monologue by a Death Row Guard (Garland) “unintentionally” and irreverently mocks the admonishments to turn off cell phones, no photos, etc., the audience received from ushers on their way in; on a further level, it connotes the unbreakable cosmic prison we all inhabit as we pass through our days.

The Fear Of 13 production is working with The Innocence Project, which assisted Yarris in real life, to help their crusade to free falsely convicted inmates. But the play never mentions the organization, a creditable choice which lifts the piece out of ephemeral current events, to a more comprehensive, lasting creative theme. The later revelation of Nick’s cruel youth, an awful assault on him as a boy, and his final re-introduction into the world after exoneration, finally illuminate that this is a play about innocence, not guilt. The Fear Of 13 title, never fully explained in the stage play, is more than a reference to a superstition of a number, but a fear of growing older, growing up, facing reality. Nick’s boyish need to tell stories as an adult, to live in fantasies that bounce between fact and fiction, are a symbol for the human need to retain an optimism and naively expectant wish for good things that rightly should end in childhood, but that sustain us long after the time we know it not to be realistic, undeniably true. After all, once life was happy, and could be again. To give up that dream is the death sentence. 

Scott Klavan, theatre writer at Escape Into Life, is an actor, director, and playwright in New York. Scott has performed on Broadway in Irena’s Vow, with Tovah Feldshuh, and in regional theater, and numerous shows Off Broadway, including five roles in two productions of The Joy Luck Club for Pan Asian Rep. His stage adaption of Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral” was produced off-Broadway by Theater Breaking Through Barriers (TBTB), and his play Double Murder was published in Best American Short Plays, Applause Books. For twenty years, Scott was the personal Script and Story Analyst for the legendary actors Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward and for companies including HBO, CAA, Warner Bros., and Viacom. He was featured in A Soldier’s Notes, an episode of the Web Series Small Miracles, alongside Judd Hirsch, and earned a nomination for Outstanding Actor in the LA Web Series Festival. Scott directed the one-woman show My Stubborn Tongue, written and performed by Anna Fishbeyn, off-Broadway at The New Ohio Theater and at the United Solo Festival; and directed and appeared in the solo play Canada Geese, by George Klas, in the New York International Fringe Festival. He directed a pilot production of the Sondheim/Lapine classic Into the Woods, cast solely with senior actors, for Music Theatre International (MTI) and Lenox Hill Neighborhood House; the show was written up in a feature in The New York Times. He also directed the follow-up pilot, Meredith Willson’s The Music Man, Sr. Scott helped to develop and directed Eleanor and Alice, by Ellen Abrams, about Eleanor Roosevelt and her cousin Alice Longworth, for the Roosevelt Library and Museum in Hyde Park and the Roosevelt House in NYC. He directed Night Shadows, by Lynda Crawford, about the poet Anna Akhmatova, for the On Women Festival at Irondale Center. Scott is a graduate of Kenyon College, where he twice won the Paul Newman Acting Trophy, and a Lifetime Acting Member of The Actors Studio and a member of the Studio’s Playwright/Directors Workshop (PDW), where his own play The Common Area was chosen as part of the PDW’s Festival of New Works. He taught Creative Writing for Johns Hopkins University Young Scholars, a nationwide program for exceptional students, and for ten years, was a Group Leader in the field of Drama Therapy, for organizations including Creative Alternatives of New York (CANY), and Counseling in Schools (CIS), working with teens and adults with emotional disabilities, from underprivileged backgrounds. In addition, Scott currently works independently developing and editing plays and other written material, and teaches older adults at the JCCManhattan and other arts organizations.