A wonderful production of this underrated gem

La Bete has always been a favorite play of mine after I stumbled onto a performance of it at the Alliance Theater in Atlanta a few years after its brief run on Broadway. I have always found it to be a work of rare genius and delightful word play, and to hear Michael Cumpsty and Tom McGowan recreate their original performances for LA Theaterworks is the kind of treat one rarely gets. They manage to embrace Hirson's heroic rhyming couplets in a way that respects the poetry and rhythm while at the same time seeming absolutely natural and conversational.

Anyone only familiar with the play from it's recent-ish revival with Mark Rylance, David Hyde Pierce, and Joanna Lumley might even wonder if it is the same play. Rylance is an actor of extremely rare gifts, but his Valere was so crass, crude, and vile from the very outset that the central argument of the play seemed unnecessary and Hyde Pierce's tragically put-upon Elomire was almost as unlikeable. It was a perfectly valid choice, but to hear McGowan's Valere suddenly shift in the final moments of the play, one is left wondering if he might just might be FAR more self aware than the last 2 hours have shown us. There is a touch of menace in his final speech and a moment, perhaps, of genuine emotion. It's masterful and so very true to the text as to be breathtaking.

Cumpsty's performance managed to bring tears toward the end that I had not expected nor was in any way prepared for. The pain of his final abandonment was devastating in a way that I could not have seen coming in all my years of familiarity with this piece.

The post performance interview with the playwright was amazing. Hirson tells how the original production was savaged by the Times because Frank Rich saw the piece as a paen to Neo-Conservatism and perhaps took the play's discussion of critical sophistry as a personal attack. Hirson completely denies this reading, but instead sees the play as a "rorshach test" where audiences (and actors) see in it very personal and different things while he claims to have had no real "point of view" while writing it. It certainly can exist on a number of levels and has at times engendered some downright violent reactions. Give it a listen.

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