Investigating this spring's true-crime trend on and off Broadway

Starting with Punch last fall and now continuing with Dog Day Afternoon, The Fear of 13, and Kenrex, crime and justice are stealing the spotlight this season.

Summary

• This article features interviews with the casts and creative teams of four true-crime-themed shows on and off Broadway: this spring's Dog Day Afternoon; The Fear of 13; and Kenrex and fall 2025's Punch

Justice is being served on and off Broadway. This season, there's a surge in true-crime and legal-themed dramas making clean getaways with the spotlight.

And why not? The subject keeps audiences glued to podcasts, TV, and documentaries. The plots of this spring's plays — fueled by tales of robbery, fatal vigilantism, and wrongful conviction — similarly read like court dockets, if not police blotters.

There's Dog Day Afternoon, about a botched bank robbery previously recounted in the 1975 Oscar-winning film and a magazine article. The Olivier Award-nominated play The Fear of 13 tells the story of Nick Yarris, a Pennsylvania man who wrongly served 22 years on death row. Also from London and now up for six Oliviers is Kenrex, about Ken Rex McElroy, who terrorized a Missouri farming community for decades and ended up dead in an unsolved case. And last fall, the trend kicked off with Punch, a drama about restorative justice that played a two-month limited run.

What makes true crime so topical and theatrical? New York Theatre Guide interrogated — actually, we just interviewed — the casts and creatives of all four shows to find out.

Dog Day Afternoon: A robbery-gone-wrong story with an innate sense of theatre

Dog Day Afternoon’s true-crime roots reach back to 1972, when an actual ill-fated armed robbery at a Brooklyn bank escalated into a media circus and explosive clash with authorities. Al Pacino and John Cazale starred as the crooks, Sonny and Sal, in Sidney Lumet’s classic film adaptation of the event.

On stage, The Bear's Jon Bernthal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach make their Broadway debuts in Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Adly Guirgis’s adaptation, directed by two-time Tony Award nominee Rupert Goold.

“It’s based on a true story about three robbers who soon become two,” said Goold. “Before they can get away, they’re discovered. They try to negotiate their way out with the police and the FBI, who are both involved.” No spoilers here.

For Goold, the tidy unity of time, place, and action held a particular appeal. “The story has an innate sense of theatre,” said Goold. “It’s all happening in the pressure cooker of one place.”

Guirgis, a playwright known for creating vivid characters, is true to form here, according to Goold. “It plays more like an ensemble piece,” he said, adding that the play transcends its 1972 setting.

“The crime story is absolutely a piece of its period,” said Goold. “But in terms of direct action, and in terms of the relationship with the authorities and the police, the storyline obviously covers a debate that is still very active now.”

Get Dog Day Afternoon tickets now.

The Fear of 13: A David-and-Goliath drama on death row

In Lindsey Ferrentino’s bio-drama The Fear of 13, two-time Oscar winner Adrien Brody makes his Broadway debut as Nick Yarris, a Pennsylvania man who served 22 years on death row for a rape and murder he didn’t commit — until DNA testing proved his innocence.

Brody and the play, based on a documentary about Yarris, were nominated for Olivier Awards for the show’s 2024 London world premiere. Beyond its legal dimensions, Ferrentino (The Queen of Versailles) regards it as “a David and Goliath story as he fights bureaucracy.”

“It’s the story about a man's life and all sorts of highs and lows and adventures that are contained within one person's experience,” she said. “The stakes are so high — you’re literally fighting for life when you’re on death row. That high-level stakes certainly lends itself to the theatre.”

Working on the play with Yarris, who’s credited as a consultant, opened Ferrentino’s eyes to the ins and outs of the justice system and how time becomes an enemy. “You’re innocent until you're proven guilty,” she said. “But once you’re guilty, to prove your innocence is so difficult. You have to prove that all these other people got it wrong.”

That’s no mean feat, and Yarris couldn't do it alone. As the play depicts, he was aided by a prison volunteer played by Tessa Thompson. “Most of the play is Nick just trying to get the DNA tested to prove he was nowhere near the crime scene,” said Ferrentino. “He was the first person in Pennsylvania to file to use DNA to try to prove his innocence, and in the time of waiting to get that DNA tested, many other people were cleared.”

In a drama that revolves around a man finally leaving prison, Ferrentino’s wish is that theatregoers leave changed in some way. “My hope is that the audience comes into the theatre and are able to personalize the issue of death row in a way that’s different than they could two hours earlier.”

Get The Fear of 13 tickets now.

Kenrex: A play that unfolds like a true-crime podcast

Kenrex, co-written by Jack Holden and Ed Stambollouian, begins April 15 at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. The show follows the real-life Missouri criminal Ken Rex McElroy, whose 1981 murder was deemed a deadly case of vigilante justice and remains unsolved today.

Holden plays 35 characters, Stambollouian directs, and John Patrick Elliott performs his mood-enhancing original score in the show that’s currently up for six Olivier Awards for its U.K. premiere.

The co-authors began working on the play as voracious fans of true-crime podcasts and documentaries. “It was post-Serial and pre-S-Town,” said Stambollouian.

“I remember calling Jack and saying, ‘Why are we why are we not telling stories like this on stage?'” said Stambollouian. “We set ourselves the challenge of taking this form that we found so compelling and putting it through the lens of theatre.”

The collaborators, who went to drama school together, got hooked on the dark tale of McElroy, who was accused of theft, livestock rustling, burglary, arson, assault with intent to kill, rape, and child molestation in Skidmore, Missouri.

After two decades of menace, he was shot and killed. In broad daylight. In public. A crowd of some three dozen people looked on. No witness came forward, and no one named names.

At one point, the creators developed the play for multiple actors but eventually settled on one performer playing various roles. They frame Kenrex as a kind of testimony, with one character, a lawyer, recounting McElroy's story to an FBI agent, and the community comes to life from there.

“We really have committed to putting a true-crime podcast on stage,” said Stambollouian. “When you listen to a podcast, you are imagining all those different characters, and your imagination is activated. We’re trying to do the same thing with Kenrex.”

Get Kenrex tickets now.

Punch: A play that got real about the power of restorative justice

James Graham’s Punch, which ran in fall 2025 on Broadway, is based on Jacob Dunne’s memoir Right From Wrong. It traces how then-19-year-old Dunne accidentally killed a stranger, 28-year-old trainee paramedic James Hodgkinson, with a single punch in 2011. He went to prison and turned his life around after meeting Hodgkinson's parents as part of a restorative justice program.

“A lot of the people in the story were involved from day one in the creation of the piece,” said actor Will Harrison, who played Dunne. “They were invaluable resources. It didn't go underappreciated, because it's a hard thing to have to relive.”

For Harrison, the play changed the way he looked at justice and big things that matter in life. “Having a real, true story that actually shows exactly the kind of change that’s possible is what a lot of people took away,” he said. “It’s so helpful that it’s real.”

Dog Day Afternoon photo credit: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman
The Fear of 13 photo credit: Emilio Madrid
Kenrex photo credit: Manuel Harlan
Punch photo credit: Matthew Murphy