In the Belly of the Beast Revisited

Jack Henry Abbott, the convicted killer whose jailhouse correspondence with Norman Mailer helped turn him into a bestselling author, died February (2002) in his prison cell, an apparent suicide. Abbott received lavish praise for In the Belly of the Beast (1981), a collection of letters he wrote to Mailer in which he laid bare the prison culture of drugs, violence and despair. Incarcerated repeatedly since the age of thirteen for an assortment of crimes–including the murder of a fellow inmate–Abbott was paroled soon after the book’s publication. But his freedom was short-lived, and literary celebrity soon turned to infamy: Just six weeks after his release on July 18th 1981, Abbott stabbed to death a twenty-two-year-old waiter and aspiring actor, Richard Adan, outside a Manhattan restaurant. Abbott received a life sentence for this crime. A spokesman for the New York State Department of Corrections, Jim Flateau, told reporters that Abbott wrote a suicide note before hanging himself with a bed sheet and a shoelace in his cell at the Wende Correctional Facility, near Buffalo. The contents of the note were not disclosed. Mailer, in a prepared statement, called his onetime protégé’s life “tragic from beginning to end.”

In the Belly of the Beast Revisited is a re-worked and updated version of a play by the same name that was presented in 1985 in NYC. Re-worked since a couple of things happened to Mr. Abbott along the way. It is adapted by Adrian Hall (as was the original) from various court records, newspapers, radio and tv accounts, two books by Jack Henry Abbott and many angry “opinions” after his death. Therefore this production is not intended as a documentary.