Lee Kinney is a Tony Award-nominated sound designer and music producer in New York City His theatrical work has earned numerous awards and nominations including Outer Critics Circle Award Honors for Outstanding Sound Design, and nominations for the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Sound Design, the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Sound Design for a Play, and the Henry Hewes Design Award.
This season, Kinney was Tony-nominated for Best Sound Design Of A Play for The Fear of 13, written by Lindsey Ferrentino and directed by David Cromer. He takes Live Design readers into the austere world of a death row cell block.
The Fear of 13
Production:
The Fear of 13
Opened April 15, on sale through July 12, 2026
James Earl Jones Theatre, Broadway
Featuring Adrien Brody & Tessa Thompson
Collaborators:
Arnulfo Maldonado, Scenic Design
Sarah Laux, Costume Design
Heather Gilbert, Lighting Design
Live Design: The quality of the sound – what did you want the audience to hear?
Lee Kinney: Arnulfo Maldonado's set for the production is made up of very tall, oppressive walls and cell doors of a death row cell block. It’s a really brutal and austere environment which frames very tender, intimate visits between Nick Yarris, a prisoner, and Jacki, a volunteer advocate. We wanted the sound design to feel deeply authentic, so that the voices sound acoustic and naturalistic within the harsh concrete visual landscape, while allowing for the small and delicate moments to be delivered across a large theater with that same intimacy and authentic acoustic experience.
The sensory experience of a person in such deprived conditions is of course extremely narrow, but in that deprivation there can be a hyper-awareness of the detail in that narrow range of experiences. We wanted the aural world to have an extremely limited palate of ambience and noise, and then to have that limited palate subtly shift in tone and texture to give a sense of time and space and focus.
The play is also set primarily in the early 90s, and telephone conversations are a significant part of the story. We wanted to capture the warmth and closeness of those phone conversations, and the quiet, nostalgic, crackle of connecting with someone that way at that particular moment of technology. For a person like Nick who is alone in a cell for hours and months and years, hearing the specific contours of a breath or a sigh on a phone call is a rich but fleeting comfort, and we wanted the sound design to help articulate those complex emotions.
LD: Architecture of the rig – what did you use and where are you placing it?
LK: Our system is primarily d&b loudspeakers, with our audio processed through a d&b DS100 processing engine. We wanted the ability to localize voices and sounds very specifically to make the production sound as realistic and un-amplified as possible, so we have 5 Y-series line arrays across the proscenium to give us robust control of localization as voices move across the stage left to right. We also wanted to be able to deliver deep thumping low end across the entire theater for a few moments that punctuate the horror of Nick’s experience, so we have four d&b KSL subs on the proscenium truss, and then several d&b B8 ultra compact subs hung under the balcony and mezzanine overhangs to fill out the low end across those sections that are shaded by the theater architecture.
LD: What piece of gear was non-negotiable?
LK: The DS100 processing engine, using both the En-Scene and En-Space software modules, is essential to the design of this show. We are using individual OSC messages from QLab to manually adjust delay time and level on every speaker for every input for maximum granular control of localization, and also using the En-Space convolution engine to carefully adapt the acoustics of the theater to emulate the much more reverberant acoustics of the visual world on stage. The IO capacity of the DS100s delay matrix, the extremely organic sound of the convolution reverb emulations, and the ease with which all of it can be specifically and dynamically controlled using OSC made the DS100 absolutely integral to the success of the design.
LD: Can you tell us who was on your sound crew?
LK: The full audio team on this production is outstanding. Sam Kusnetz is the associate designer, Simon Matthews is production sound, Hannah Overton is our A1, and Scott Kuker is our A2.
LD: What makes the sound for this production so successful for you?
LK: I think it’s how the sound is in such close relationship to the performance, in terms of shape and tone and rhythm. The performances are so delicate, and spare, and nuanced, but bloom into brief larger moments of richness and joy and memory. I think the sound design of the production tracks those shapes, gently making the experience of the story, and the environment of characters, feel just a little more saturated and grand as the emotional story swells, and then gently contracting back to the stark severity of Nick’s isolated reality in prison. The production reveals just enough of those moments of richness to make you really feel the sharpness of their absence when they evaporate, and we tried to have the sound design very delicately animate those peaks and valleys.