Going Beyond Laughs

Yasmina Reza wishes they wouldn’t laugh quite so loudly. Since the original French version of “Art” premiered in Paris in 1994, says the French-born playwright, audiences have been howling through some of her best lines. When a British translation of “Art” opened in London’s West End in 1996, winning an Olivier Award, people were in hysterics from the moment the curtain went up. Things were no better on Broadway when Alan Alda, Victor Garber and Alfred Molina performed in an updated Americanized translation, winning the 1998 Tony for best play. And now, the same cast is re-creating their roles, opening Tuesday at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles.

“I would not say I’m not happy to see people laugh, but I would like them to laugh at the right moments,” says the 39-year-old actress-turned-playwright, with a knowing gleam in her eye. Reza has carved out an hour for an interview from the whirlwind that appears to be her life, and is sipping tea at the Hotel Lutetia, near her home on the Left Bank. Ever chic, Reza looks tired on this day; she dabs her nose with a bunched-up tissue, and behind her designer glasses, her eyes are slightly pink. But when she speaks, slipping only occasionally out of the competent English she has learned in the last few years, it’s with the energy of a blizzard. “But you can’t direct an audience; they do what they want,” she says with a disappointed cluck of the tongue. Then she smiles her ready smile: “I would love to direct them.”

There is a bitter edge to the comedy that ensues around the tangled threesome in “Art,” as Serge, Marc and Yvan sit around one another’s Paris apartments arguing after Serge spends 200,000 francs (about $40,000) on an all-white painting. What begins as an aesthetic debate becomes a viciously personal, bitingly funny battle that leaves them wondering aloud to each other and in a series of asides at the ties that bind them.

“American and English and French audiences all laugh at different things,” said British translator Christopher Hampton, 52, whose credits include the stage and screen adaptations of “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” in a separate interview. “But we were startled at the amount of laughter. It was dismaying. We even took out one or two jokes in New York about psychiatrists that [Reza] felt were pandering to a New York audience.”

“I spent a lot of time drawing attention to the tragic side of the story,” said 32-year-old English director Matthew Warchus by phone from backstage at New York’s Royale Theatre, where “Art” is in its third Broadway cast. “I didn’t want the audience to laugh so much. But they still do laugh an awful lot. It’s one of those plays that the more seriously and earnestly you play it, the more people laugh. It’s like ‘Candid Camera,’ in which the audience is laughing at a pretty horrific situation, but the people involved in the situation have no idea that what’s happening is remotely funny.”

Yet Reza isn’t surprised that her third play has been the most successful: “It’s the easiest play I’ve written,” she says. “It can be taken at a lot of levels. It’s not so easy when you read it deeply.”

It was acting, not writing, that first drew Reza to the stage. But she didn’t have the patience to wait by the phone for the next part, she says, so in 1987, she wrote her first play, “Conversations After a Burial,” which won her a Moliere Award (the French equivalent of a Tony) for best author. The self-taught writer has been praised for her ability to write seamless dialogue. “I was very gifted,” she says unapologetically. “I don’t think [writing dialogue] can be learned. It’s just a gift. You have it, or not.” Daughter of a Hungarian-Jewish mother and an Iranian-Jewish father born in Moscow, Reza says she always felt a bit the outsider in her native France. “But I love France,” she says. “It’s my language, so I feel typically French as a writer. Language is the real country of a writer.”

While Reza’s first two plays were well-received in the state-subsidized French theater, critics were dismissive of “Art,” which was a commercial hit. Even when Sean Connery co-produced “Art” in the West End, her French peers weren’t the slightest bit impressed that it was the first play in decades by a modern French author to be staged in London.

“You are not really respected here if you are successful in London,” she says wearily. “When I had the Tony Award and I came back here, people asked me, ‘What were you doing in New York? Did you enjoy yourself?’ It was like nothing.”

British and American critics have been divided. As London’s Sunday Independent summed up in a story in early 1998, speculating on an upcoming New York Times review of the Broadway opening: “If [critic Ben Brantley] sides with this paper, the Times and the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs, he may think ‘Art’ is ‘funny, sophisticated, stylish,’ ‘a minor classic,’ ‘cracking entertainment’ and ‘exquisitely funny.’ If he sides with the Sunday Times, the Guardian, Independent and Spectator, he may think ‘Art’ is ‘banal,’ ‘panders to popular prejudice,’ is ‘meringue masquerading as piquantly sauced meat,’ ‘a snob hit’ and ‘coffeetable theatre of the worst sort.’ ”

Brantley wrote later: “It’s an impeccably tailored piece of work . . . and it’s not empty-minded. But at 90 intermissionless minutes, it is also slight and nonabrasive enough to let you sandwich it between drinks and dinner for an easygoing night on the town.”

Critical attention aside, audiences love “Art.” Thanks to its success in London and New York, where it is still selling out, “Art” has now been translated into nearly 30 languages. Reza’s “The Unexpected Man,” also written in 1994, opened to sellout crowds last spring in London. Again translated by Hampton and directed by Warchus, it is a more somber work about strangers sitting opposite on a train, one a well-known author, the other a fan too embarrassed to tell him she has his book in her purse. Hampton is working on translating a third play into English. Reza published her first novel, “Hammerklavier,” in 1997 and has written the screenplay for an upcoming French film “Le Pique-nique de Lulu Kreutz,” directed by Didier Martiny (with whom she reportedly lives and who is said to be the father of her two children, although she would not confirm this). She is now at work on her second novel--too early, she says, to say what it’s about.

“The subjects are always very sad,” she offers. “If I had an optimistic view of life, I would not write. The saddest moments in my life are the best for me to write. If I were a happy person--I mean I am very gay, I’m not sad,” she adds, apparently trying not to sound maudlin--”but if I were deeply happy, I would not write.” She finds her material, she says, “in all the failures.”

Reza writes in the afternoon, in a small office near her house. “I could write here,” she says of the Hotel Lutetia. “I could write in an airport, on a train, or almost anywhere if I am on my own.” Just as long as she feels like it. “I never feel obliged to write. It’s not my profession, it’s just a way of life for me. If I have the feeling it’s an emergency to write, I do it. If I don’t, I don’t write. I never in my life wrote because I was asked to,” she says.

She admits that she probably wouldn’t have stuck to it if she hadn’t been able to make a living writing from the start. “The great Russian writers like Tolstoy had to write in the newspaper each week to make a living, and they are genius,” she says. “I could not have done that.” But she is careful to say that she doesn’t want to get too carried away with commercial success.

Besides her own high standards, Reza says, she relies on a few close friends to keep her honest. “They are very, very severe,” she says, laughing. “They are horrible. But I know they love me, really. I do what I want, of course, but I always listen because they are very demanding, and I have chosen them for that reason. They want for me the best in my way, so I trust them, and I am very comfortable with them, and you cannot imagine how lucky I am to have those three people. It’s an incredible bit of luck.

“A lot of great people one day are so famous, are so successful they don’t want people around them who would say, ‘Well, listen, it’s not so good,’ ” she says, citing the French author Marguerite Duras, who was surrounded by sycophants in the end, telling her she was a genius. “I don’t want that for me at all,” says Reza, shaking her head. “It would be a catastrophe! It would be the end of everything!”

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“ART,” UCLA/James A. Doolittle Theatre, 1615 N. Vine St., Hollywood. Dates: Opens Tuesday at 8 p.m. Schedule Tuesday-Saturday, 8 p.m. Dark this Wednesday. Ends March 14. Prices: $20-$60. Phone: (800) 447-7400.