STAGE REVIEW : ‘BEAST’ MAINTAINS ITS DISTANCE

The Mark Taper Forum’s production of “In the Belly of the Beast”--a veteran of the Taper, Too (1984), the 1985 Festival of Sidney (Australia) and the Taper’s main stage (last spring)--opened Thursday at Off-Broadway’s Joyce Theater with the same stark assault on our perceptions, yet with a considerably less spectacular effect on the sensibilities of some members of New York’s critical community.

They found the three-character quasi-monodrama (it is about only one man: convicted murderer Jack Henry Abbott) variously “lacking the fierce compulsiveness of the book” (New York Times) or failing “to ignite” (Daily News).

In these reviews, at least, the very things one admired most in this Taper version of the “Beast”--extreme restraint and an absence of emotionalism--have come under fire.

Based on a mix of prison interviews, transcripts from Abbott’s trial (for the murder of Richard Adan, a New York coffee-shop manager) and Abbott’s own book, “In the Belly of the Beast: Letters From Prison,” the play, adapted by Adrian Hall and further adapted in this Taper production by director Robert Woodruff, is a taut 90-minute excoriation of conscience--ours and Abbott’s, together.

From the start, what has been extraordinary about the work is its lucidity. Abbott has an exceptional grasp of the paradox in his situation as victim and product of the same relentlessly destructive penal system.

This tour of his life is an illustrated manual on how the viciousness and indoctrinations of the system instill and reinforce distortions of character that render an individual less and less fit for the society that spawned him.

In Abbott’s case it comes to countless foster homes, 5 years of juvenile prisons (“for failure to adjust to foster homes”), 19 years of adult ones (more by now) and a grand total of 9 months of freedom since the age of 12.

Abbott never apologizes (“I demand responsibility for myself”), but explains his behavior with the rigor and meticulousness of an uncommonly bright man, articulate and self-taught, bent on listing his grievances so that we might better understand the corruption of the system. There is no self-pity, and passion only when it is aroused by Abbott’s struggle to exorcise the nightmare in order to survive it.

This very detachment and deliberate distance is what made the Hall/Woodruff adaptation so remarkable. Jarring buzzers and the almost bare, monochromatic stage, in counterpoint to the devastating vividness of the narrative emphasize the play’s duality of purpose: to underscore the sterility and violence of the prison trauma, while the row of TV monitors suspended above the proscenium stage also suggests how easily we can remove ourselves from it all through the phenomenon of electronic distancing.

This presentational formality is what is most criticized here and yet what makes so compelling the ghoulish accounts of Abbott’s life in maximum security prisons: his days in blackout cells; his time in “strip” cells with light 24 hours a day; his year on cockroaches and “the starvation diet” (“the need to eat becomes the need to devour--like an animal”), all leading inexorably to such a thorough scrambling of behavioral instincts that they not only caused him to kill Adan in a fatal error of perception, but also may well keep him behind bars for the rest of his life. Anything more emotional and less presentationally distant would be unbearable.

On the other hand, Andrew Robinson has settled into the Abbott role more than he should. The approach now feels too calculated, lacking in the impulsiveness that made it such a shocker in its early days at the Taper, Too. It is as if the extreme stylizations of the supporting players--Andy Wood and William Allen Young in a host of other roles--have proved contagious.

Yet even with this handicap, the piece remains psychologically tonic--perhaps less a play than a dialectic, but clinically precise, theatrically bracing and morally stunning.

‘IN THE BELLY OF THE BEAST’ Presented at the Joyce Theater, New York City, by the American Theater Exchange, the Joyce Theater Foundation, Inc. and the Center Theatre Group/Mark Taper Forum. Adapted from the book by Jack Henry Abbott by Adrian Hall and further adapted by Robert Woodruff. Director Robert Woodruff. Associate producer Madeline Puzo. Set design John Ivo Gilles. Costume design Carol Brolaski. Lighting design Pauli Jenkins. Music Douglas Wieselman. Sound design Stephen Shaffer. Video design Chip Lord and Branda Miller. Cast Andrew Robinson, Andy Wood, William Allen Young.