David Hirson's "La Bête' on Broadway

A critic cleverer than I am
Might review this show entirely in iamb.
But alas and alack my brain it quails;
My high falutin' wish it fails.
Unlike the brilliant David Hirson,
The task defeats this humble person.

But wait! Perhaps I quail too quickly--
A rhyme is now uprising (I'm feeling sickly).
No, perhaps it's just my gorge--
Ahead may be the wrong way to forge.
My rhyming effort merely shows
I'll have to write my rave in prose.

La Bête is a wild Molière parody/homage, nearly two hours of rhyming couplets delivered at breakneck speed. The effect is jawdroppingly amazing— and very, very funny.

The plot revolves around a troupe of elegant, polished tragedians, under royal patronage, who find themselves forced by the Princess to accept a new member: a street clown whose egomaniacal vulgarity sets a new standard for boorishness.

La Bête ("the beast") describes the play's central character, Valère (played by the dazzling, hilarious, brave Mark Rylance, arguably England's greatest actor— classical and otherwise). When Valère enters— sputtering half-chewed food, farting, belching, flaunting his crass pretensions to learnedness— he begins a monologue, in iambic pentameter, that lasts without interruption for nearly half an hour.

Tour de force doesn't begin to cover it. Elan is far too feeble. It has, as a friend of mine says, a certain, indefinable chemin de fer.

Half-hour monologue

The theater company is led by Elomire (an anagram for Molière), played by David Hyde Pierce (a stage actor whom you may know as Frasier's psychiatrist brother on the TV sitcom). Pierce's face and body must convey all his reactions, since for a long while he can't get a word in edgewise. He is wonderfully exasperated, repulsed, appalled and flabbergasted. He'd be dumbfounded, if he had the choice. Add terrified to that list when the Princess (Joanna Lumley, who lends the role a spectacular hauteur) puts her royal foot down.

The device to test Valère's skills is the performance of his play, thereby offering us a rhyming play within this rhyming play. Adding to our wonderment is a maid played with delicious weirdness by Greta Lee (the maid is named, as any Molière fan could guess, Dorine); she is nearly mute and can speak only single words (all of which rhyme) and must mime her meanings. We are assured this is just a phase she's going through.

Dissolving bookshelves

The set, designed by Mark Thompson is a knockout— immensely tall walls of books that ultimately dissolve into the mists (of time, no doubt) as Elomire, wrapped as a tragicomic pilgrim in black cloak and looking like a Friedrich painting, makes his exit.

Besides the not-to-be-missed performances, which zip along under the merry direction of Matthew Warchus (he won the 2009 Tony for God of Carnage), La Bête delivers more insider theater jokes than anyone in the audience will get.

Speaking of theater jokes, right across the street, in the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, is another insider's play, full of insider jokes: David Mamet's A Life in the Theatre. Seeing them both in one day is tasty almost beyond telling.