La Bête
Written by David Hirson
Broadway's Music Box Theatre
To bring a play to Broadway in 2010 that is set in 17th century France and written entirely in Iambic pentameter couplets might seem either a producer's pipe dream or a death wish. I can't vouch for its commercial prospects, but La Bête (a British-born revival of David Hirson's 1991 work, which earlier had a brief run on Broadway) is the most daring and delightful play of the Broadway season thus far. David Hyde Pierce, looking quite at home in foppish long hair and beard, plays the snooty leader of a theatrical troupe, forced to join forces with a boorish colleague who has diarrhea of the mouth, and sometimes of other body parts as well. Hirson's rhyming dialogue is clever, self-aware and surprisingly natural, as its sneaks up on an exploration of the clash between elitist and populist art. The fly in this Molierian ointment, for me, was Mark Rylance, the British actor who hams it up unmercifully as the crude thespian — playing him as some sort of drugged out surfer dude, rushing through the ends of lines as if to apologize for Hirson's mannered rhyme scheme. Naturally, he's won critical raves. Happily, he doesn't ruin Matthew Warchus' enjoyable, sprightly-but-somber production.