YASMINA REZA A Writer and Her Words

As we walk into the Greenwich Hotel, Robert De Niro’s new boutique spot in downtown Manhattan, we are directed to the lounge, where our subject is sitting on one of the many dark leather armchairs, by a fireplace that burns gloriously the carefully placed wood. There is something strikingly attractive and quite mysterious about playwright and author, Yasmina Reza. Maybe it is the way she sips her cup of tea, or the way the curls of her wavy black hair accentuate her cheekbones. Or maybe it is the cherry-colored lipstick that brings a curve to her lips, or the way she sits — her petite body with perfect posture, and a cashmere sweater atop a short skirt. All of these indeed, but it is probably her self-proclaimed citizenship that wins the day. As we begin our conversation, she says quietly, “My country is the one of language. I became a writer mostly to have a country of my own.”

Born in Paris, France, to immigrant parents, Reza was an avid reader and grew up paying close attention to words. After giving acting a try, she remained in theater as a writer, scripting her first play, “Conversations After a Burial,” in her late twenties, which became an instant hit in France and Germany. Her play, “Art,” gave her international recognition and placed her work in a worldwide arena. Her early success was followed by novels and other notable writings, a Tony Award for “Art” in 1998, and this year brought her a second Tony for Best Play with Broadway’s “God of Carnage.” Her plays have been produced worldwide and translated into 35 languages. She recently completed directing her first feature film, Chicas, starring Emmanuelle Seigner.

In the city of skyscrapers for a short visit, Reza spoke to us about success, dedication, and the curious nature of her craft.

Venice: In the past, you’ve mentioned a worry about your plays not being taken seriously. Where does that come from?

Yasmina Reza: It’s a dangerous thing to write a play at which people laugh. Because at the very minute you have an audience laughing, it looks like entertainment without any substance. When I wrote “Art,” I thought I wrote a tragedy — I would say a funny tragedy. Of course, I knew there were a lot of moments that were humorous, but I thought it was, overall, a heartbreaking play about the rupture of a friendship. When it was staged in Paris and I heard the audience laughing from the beginning until the end, although it was a success, I was distressed. I thought nobody truly heard the play. Sometimes I wish I could be present at all my plays like a music conductor signaling to the audience, “Okay, now you can have a little laugh, now a big laugh, now no laughter.” [laughs]

A play seems not to end with the writer. Actually, it only begins there, and hence the distinct ways to stage and interpret.

It has to do with directing. At the beginning of my career as a playwright, I was trying to see all the productions of my plays all over the world. I was very curious, they were so different. A play is what you make of it on stage. You are the author, indeed, yet the play takes on a life of its own after the writing is completed. With the actors, directors, and the audience, they all have a part in giving shape to the piece.

Your play, “Art,” premiered in Paris in 1995 and became an international phenomenon. There’s often a pressure on the artist to create something new after a highly recognized piece. How did you cope with that?

It was very difficult to write a play after that. It took me five years. I wrote short novels and a novel in between. I couldn’t come back to theater. The glory of “Art” was too much. It felt like a shadow had come over me; people had expectations, they wanted me to write another play and reach that level of success. After “Art,” I wrote a very personal book, Hammerklavier, which is about my children and the death of my father; it was not a commercial book. I am not associated with the success of a play; a play is me, but not its success. I’m happy about the outcome, but I don’t want to deal with it. I want to be free; that’s the most important thing for me, my freedom. I want to be able to write whatever I write because I feel like writing it, even if only ten people read it.

A decade after “Art,” you did come up with yet another worldwide triumph, your play, “God of Carnage.”

It was pure luck. People said to me, “Never will you have a second success like ‘Art,’” but I did. I didn’t write it with that intention, it happened on its own. I didn’t plan anything. It was a German request; an important director wanted to open a theater with a play of mine. I had no intention to write for the theater at that moment, but my agent called and said, “Jürgen Gosch wants to open the season in Zurich with a new play of yours.” And I said, “No way.” Then I had an idea. I called back and said, “When do you need it?” And I was told three to four months. I wrote the play to write a play; I didn’t intend to write another success. It’s a pure marvel that it was immediately requested for production all around the world.

About your writing process: When and how do you pour the words and ideas onto the page?

I write in the afternoons. If I am in the process of writing a play, I write every day, because a play is very technical and you’ve got to be immersed in it. If you spend three days without writing, you lose the beat. To write every day is not easy. I’m not a writer who wakes up in the morning, jumps out of bed, and says, “Okay, I have to write today.” I prefer to live life, I prefer to do anything else but writing. Nobody can teach you how to write. Writing is a way of living, it’s instinctive. Life leads you to writing.

We are shaped by our environment. How did your upbringing affect your craft?

I was born in Paris, to parents who were foreigners. My mother had escaped from Hungary, my father was born in Iran. They were both Jewish, and my family members were spread all over the world — Israel, Latin America, the United States. Growing up I felt like I was from nowhere, with no country of my own, no religion of my own; my parents didn’t want to raise us on a specific religion. My father wanted us to be assimilated in the French culture, he wanted us to speak French well, I paid attention to words and language. The way Jewish people talk is very to the point, there are no fluffy words; I grew up around that, and it affected my writing. I like direct writing. I like silence. I write in order to put silence, not only in theater but also in my fiction. We can create silence only if words are short and to the point. Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett have always written short. We each have our way of expression.

What is your main influence for your writing?

Music. I studied music and it gave me a special ear for words and the way words sound in space. When I write I think about how it sounds, exactly like composing a piece of music. Does it have rhythm? Have I used this word before? Am I repeating myself? Does it flow? Translation is painful for me precisely because I don’t hear the original music of the play.

You have a long-standing collaboration with Christopher Hampton, who translates your works from French to English.

I first met Christopher for “Art” because it was my first play to be translated. He was a playwright and it was important for me to have a translator who also had a background in theater. When working on translating my work, we fight, we agree, we disagree; the result is always great.

How did you discover the realm of theater?

When I finished school, which was quite boring for me, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do with my life. When I was at university I took a theater class and discovered I enjoyed it, so I attended the International Theatre School Jacques Lecoq in Paris, and began to work as an actress. Very quickly, however, I realized acting was not my destiny. When you are an actor, you wait on being called for an audition; the waiting to get a part is torturous, so I said, “No, thank you.” I was in the milieu of theater, which I liked, so I thought, “Why not write a play?” Looking back now it was a crazy thought, yet I wrote “Conversations After a Burial.” The play did very well and I kept on writing.

Your daughter is 21 and your son is 16. How do you balance writing and motherhood?

Writing is something I do as a living. When my daughter was younger, she understood that so well. Wherever we were, I had to take out a notebook and write something out, sometimes for hours, and she would not say a word. She would do something else meanwhile. It was extraordinary. I remember when she was six years old, we went to spend three days by the sea. It was the month of September, I was writing a novel, I wasn’t supposed to write while with her. I wanted to give her my undivided attention, yet at one point, when we were in our hotel room, I felt inspired. We were playing a game and I told her I had to stop and write and she said, “Okay,” without any whining, and for two hours she did drawings quietly while I worked. Sometimes you feel the rush to write — it could be in the middle of the night, even if it’s just a sentence, you have to write it down in that moment of clarity, otherwise it escapes.

In what ways do theater and fiction differ?

Dealing with a novel is solitary. You are on your own, alone in a room, and when it comes out in bookstores — with the exception of a few book-signing events — you don’t know who reads it, how people react to it, you don’t know what happens to the book after you write it. It’s very mysterious. In theater, you share things with people; it has a long life. A play can be performed for years and years, it changes all the time from production to production. I must say, however, it’s heartbreaking when you see a catastrophic production of your piece. You feel like you cannot catch your breath, it’s a horrible feeling.

As another exploration in writing, your book, Dawn Dusk or Night, sprung from your accompanying Nicolas Sarkozy during his 2006 campaign for the French presidency. Why politics? Why Sarkozy?

I was very curious about politics as a way of living. I met people in my lifetime for whom politics was like a drug, more important than anything else. They could leave a situation in a second to attend a political meeting. I wanted to know what makes this addiction to politics so powerful. Who was the man in France at the time who had the potential? It was Nicolas Sarkozy.

You directed your first movie, Chicas, and in the notes you state: “For a long time, I’ve wanted to make a film. For a long time, I’ve been terribly attracted to the idea of telling a story in pictures.”

It’s based on a little portion of a play I had written called “Spanish Play,” which John Turturro had directed in New York some years ago, and I rewrote and directed it as a film. John wanted to turn it into a movie but had no time, so I decided to do it myself; I didn’t want to do a movie to do a movie, I wanted to write something in a different way. Instead of using words, I wanted to use images, and speak in the language of the visual.

You once said in an interview, “Writers, like tyrants, are capable of bending the world to their will.” Does a writer have a role to fulfill in society?

None. The world can go on perfectly well without writers. We don’t have to be visionaries, we don’t have to be enlightened, we don’t have to have an opinion on everything, we don’t have to have an awakened conscience. We are simply writers. We don’t write for a purpose. We write to write. We are free. People look at writers as if we embody ultimate wisdom, as if we are supposed to be wise. Well, we are not, at all. [laughs] We are like painters. We are like a sponge. We see things and we write about things we see and feel. If it’s a good writer, then people read and say, “Oh yes, I recognize that feeling.” I think the major function of a writer is to put a mirror up to the world, and for people to have that instant when they read it and they suddenly don’t feel alone. They feel comforted by the writer’s description of a heartbreak or a loss, and they say to themselves, “I am not alone, I can relate to this, someone else has been through that as well.” A writer is not here to explain the world, a writer is here to put a mirror to the world and describe it. Life is about contradictory ideas, and a good writer is the one who can  bring those contradictions to the page.

What, then, is the invisible thread that links all of your writings?

The main one is time passing. Everything that I’ve written is on how human beings deal with the concept of time passing. What kind of arrangements do we do with that? It’s about the relationship we have to time. What is alive? Time is so short, and we forget its brevity. ▼

“God of Carnage,” with its new cast— Jimmy Smits, Annie Potts, Ken Stott, and Christine Lahti — is at the Bernard Jacobs Theatre, 242 W. 45th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit http://godofcarnage.com/home.php or call (212) 239-6200.