Tessa Thompson to make Broadway debut with Adrien Brody

After a delectable portrayal of the bisexual menace Hedda Gabler in the mononymous movie directed by Nia DaCosta, Tessa Thompson is taking her talents to the Broadway stage. She won't be alone as she's joined by two-time Oscar winner Adrien Brody, who is reprising his role in a play called The Fear of 13, written by Lindsey Ferrentino, who recently made her Broadway debut as the book writer for The Queen of Versailles. The play will run for 16 weeks at the James Earl Jones Theater, starting on March 19, with an April 15 opening.

According to a press release, the show will follow Nick Yarris (Brody), who spends more than two decades on death row for a murder he insists he did not commit. He is telling his story to a prison volunteer named Jackie (Thompson), and the synopsis for the show says that "as Nick and Jackie’s conversations deepen, the line between witness and participant blurs, forcing both to confront what justice demands, what belief requires, and the perilous distance between true freedom and the illusion of self-determination."

The last time Thompson was in a theater production was in 2016, when she starred in an Off-Broadway production of Smart People with Mahershala Ali and Joshua Jackson. This announcement also comes in the middle of awards season, when Thompson is campaigning for Hedda, for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe at last Sunday's ceremony.