There’s nothing modest or subtle about “La Bête,” the new verse drama by David Hirson at the O’Neill. The play—a mock-seventeenth-century didactic comedy about a fictional actor-playwright whose patron wants him to enlist the acting and writing talents of a charlatan rival—is written entirely in rhymed couplets, after the style of Moliere. Mr. Hirson, a newcomer to the Broadway stage, is clearly no dummy. A native of New York (your program tells you), he studied at Yale and Oxford and has written for The London Review of Books, Contemporary Literary Criticism, and the TLS. (Your program also tells you the playwright’s age, 32, as though to advertise his precocity.) Mr. Hirson has certainly mastered the art of aping Richard Wilbur’s translations of Moliere: like Wilbur, he knows how to make formal verse humorous through colloquialism. But where Wilbur uses a modern idiom to widen the scope of Moliere’s satire (so that it includes contemporary society, by implication), “La Bête” merely exhibits the vices that have been comedy’s and satire’s chief targets since the beginning.
The problem resides in Mr. Hirson’s central figure—the controversial poetaster Valère, played by Tom McGowan. Valère is supposed to be a loathsome fellow—foppish, conceited, and endlessly impressed by his own genius. But, having brought Valère onstage after a brief exchange between the hero, Elomire (Michael Cumpsty), and his manager, Béjart (James Greene), Mr. Hirson proceeds to do nothing more than prove that Valère is loathsome indeed. This he does at great length, by means of a twenty-five minute set piece for Valère, which Elomire and Béjart, for reasons that remain obscure, fail to interrupt. The speech doesn’t go anywhere: it doesn’t enhance either the plot or our understanding of the precise nature of Valère’s egotism; it merely establishes again and again and again and again that Valère is smug and self-worshipping. Since the play seems to have stopped dead, and since the only thing being put on display is the playwright’s facility with rhyme and meter, it begins to seem embarrassingly likely that Valère is more a reflection his creator’s faults than those of society.
More problematic is the way no one in the play engages with anyone else. There are no dialogues, really; and nothing that any character says or does seems capable of affecting anyone else. We ought to be able to feel sorry for Valère when Elomire finally tells him off, or at least to see something of ourselves in him. But Valère is really just a composite of showy rhymes. It’s a measure of the play’s anti-theatricality that Jennifer Tipton has to punctuate Act I with unnecessary blackouts to force applause from the audience; that when Valère finally does shut up, and Elomire and Béjart at last embark on a conversation with each other, the director, Richard Jones, has Mr. McGowan upstaging them with antics like falling off furniture; and that when, at the climax of Act I, Elomire tells Valère what he thinks of him, Mr. Jones feels he can seat Valère downstage with his back to the audience. Something almost happens in Act II, when Elomire attempts to prove Valère’s charlatanism by having the company perform one of his plays. But the play within a play turns out to be a washout—a narrative monologue, which, though full of inept rhymes, curiously resembles the outer play in its didacticism as well as in its failure to give the actors a chance to act. How one wishes that Mr. Cumpsty and Mr. Greene, whose performacnes are by far the best things about “La Bête,” were playing Moliere and that they had more to do.
At the end of Act II, Elomire makes a big—and unfortunate—speech championing great writing. If “La Bête” were being staged at a big repertory theater in a season that had produced a number of genuine classics, there might be something for this tirade to refer to other than (by implication) Mr. Hirson’s own play. But, like the anagrammatic name of the hero, Mr. Hirson’s play is self-glorifying. There’s no reason for “La Bête” to be set where and when it is except to give Mr. Hirson an excuse to write in rhymed couplets, and no reason for the play to exist at all except to allow the playwright to indulge himself and the audience to feel smug. I wouldn’t have thought that the moral purpose of comedy in any century.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, February 25, 1991