About The Book

Here, collected for the first time, are David Hirson’s audacious, famously controversial plays, La B”te 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. He is, as Newsday declared, “a gutsy . . . genuinely original writer who revels in extremes of intellectual virtuosity and pop culture savvy.”

Written entirely in rhyming couplets, La B”te 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.

Praise

“La B”te is the boldest and most original play to be produced on Broadway in many years, and the rare one that is both serious and funny. It is the stuff that made us fall in love with the theatre to begin with.” –Martin Gottfried, Theaterweek

“A big, prickly, multileveled play that distinguishes itself with extraordinary artistry and daring.” –David Patrick Stearns, USA Today (on Wrong Mountain)