La Bete and Wrong Mountain

"Here, collected for the first time, are David Hirson's audacious, famously controversial plays, La Bete and Wrong Mountain. Hirson stunned Broadway with these wickedly subversive, dazzlingly literate works, marking him as a thrillingly unique and innovative talent in the vanguard of contemporary American dramatists." "Written entirely in rhyming couplets, La Bete is a quicksilver tragicomedy of language in which a crisis befalling an imagined seventeenth-century acting troupe provides the basis for a relentlessly deepening Chinese box of opinions about life and art." In the wildly inventive Wrong Mountain, Henry Dennett, an obscure yet imperious poet who expresses disdain for contemporary theater, writes a play on a bet and achieves the acclaim that has always eluded him, forcing him to confront questions about identity, aesthetics, and the American definition of success.