Many Laughs but Few Thoughts from La Bete

David Hirson's La Bete got off to an inauspicious start when it first premiered on Broadway in 1991. After a few previews, it only made it two twenty-five performances. Perhaps this was because it's entirely in iambic pentameter and set in Seventeenth Century France. But now, it's going for its second Broadway run after a successful West End revival. Its run was so successful that the producers brought it straight to Broadway this fall without a break. La Bete made it to everyone's most anticipated fall theatre list from New York Magazine to Vogue.

Sitting in the last balcony row of the packed Music Box Theatre during a recent weekday performance, the laughter all around me affirmed the show's newfound popularity. People seemed to love the nearly forty minutes worth of jokes and play on words that opened this two hour production. Indeed, there is something delightful about the cognitive dissonance of hearing contemporary, dirty jokes in a play told in rhyming iambic pentameter set three hundred and fifty years earlier in France. Maybe it's because it makes us modern audiences feel smarter. Also making us feel smart is the whole irony of a play about plays.

The farcical gist of La Bete is that the esteemed playwright Elomire (David Hyde Pierce) gets a new player, Valere (Mark Rylance), foisted on him by his patron, the Princess (Joanna Lumley). Elomire is a man of ideas who writes "serious" plays. He has no tolerance of vulgarity for vulgarity's sake. Just look at him working when the play opens. Surrounded by a huge library of books, we see him scratching away with his quill in a somber corner desk. His solitude is quickly ruined by Valere, the Princess's recommendation who looks like he has been sleeping on the street. Valere quickly launches into a monologue about his thoughts on art as he tries to persuade Elomire that he's the perfect addition to his acting troupe.

Mark Rylance's Valere is the main reason to see La Bete. His 25 minute opening diabtribe comes off as what a naturally self-absorbed person would say. Without skipping a beat, he goes from asking Elomire if he's talked too much about himself right back to talking about himself. If ADD had been diagnosable in the Seventeenth Century, Valere would have had it. Valere flits from Cicero to The Bible as topics of conversation. Rylance uses his body--in addition to words--to produce a comic effect. Before Valere's arrival, Elomire warns that Valere spits as he speaks. Sure enough, Rylance arrives eating and spitting simultaneously. After all this food, Valere develops some gas. He finally relieves himself in Elomire's bathroom, straining and talking through a half-open door.

However, once Rylance's performance is over, things get serious. The Princess shows up to order Elomire to accept Valere. Except, you see, Elomire, the Princess, and Valere all have different ideas of what "art" ought to be. Hirson gives the Princess and Elomire lengthy speeches where they spell out their different beliefs. Though delivered in iambic pentameter, this part is quite unsubtle and boring. Elomire and the Princess state the positions that you'd expect from a wealthy 17th Century patron and a well-known 17th Century playwright.

Less boring--but still cliched--Hirson allows Valere to perform a play within a play that spells out his beliefs about the state of art in 17th Century France. Again, no surprise here. His play seems to criticize the formal artistic establishment. Finally, only in the last ten minutes of the play does Hirson introduce a key point of tension: Will the troupe's players go with Valere or with Elomire? Though the troupes make a pretty clear decision, the audience is left with an unclear message. Hirson does not spend enough time explaining either actors' opinions or art or where these opinions come from. This leads to an abrupt, and somewhat unsastisfying ending. Luckily, we are consoled by the remembrance of the first half of the play and its clever laughs.