Yasmina Reza

Celebrated Playwright Who Resists CelebrityBy ELAINE SCIOLINO
PARIS — Yasmina Reza is one of the world’s most successful playwrights, but she wears her fame with discomfort. She can talk at length about her red leather Prada coat. She can relate stories with biting humor about her year on the road shadowing Nicolas Sarkozy in his 2007 campaign for the French presidency. But ask her about herself, and the anxiety of the writerly persona takes over.

A blend of fragility and steel, Ms. Reza wavers between extremes: a determination to be judged by her work alone and a desire that it be understood and appreciated. The publication of her new play, “Comment Vous Racontez la Partie” (“How You Talk the Game”), has propelled her, once again, to face a reporter.

“After I write, I have nothing to say,” she said in an interview in the bar of the Lutetia Hotel on the Left Bank. “The commentary afterwards is superfluous. I write. And that’s enough.”

But then she has something to say. Speaking in French, she pours out criticism of journalists who cut too close to the bone. “Too often what are described as interviews are inquisitions,” she said. “It’s not about the work. It’s more like, ‘Who are you?,’ which really, really annoys me. If I didn’t have to do them, I wouldn’t. But if you don’t talk yourself, there will be 20 people talking about you ahead of you.”

This is a good moment for Ms. Reza. In October the film “Carnage,” adapted and directed by her friend Roman Polanski and based on her 2009 Tony Award-winning play, “God of Carnage,” will be released. Starring Kate Winslet, Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly and Christoph Waltz, the movie had to be shot in France (the locations disguised to look like Brooklyn) because it is one of the few countries to which Mr. Polanski can travel without risking extradition to the United States. (Mr. Polanski, who has a home in Switzerland, remains wanted in connection with a 34-year-old case involving sex with a 13-year-old girl.)

In addition to her silences, Ms. Reza can tantalize her readers with partial information. She dedicated “Dawn Dusk or Night,” her best-selling book about Mr. Sarkozy on the campaign trail, to a man believed to be her lover at the time, a politician she identified only as “G.” There was speculation in the press then that “G” might be Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former International Monetary Fund chief, who resigned after being accused of sexually assaulting a hotel maid this month in New York. The speculation was a kind of game of elimination based on phrases in the book suggesting that “G” was a Socialist who dreamed of becoming the president of France. Ms. Reza did not reveal “G” ’s name. She has no comment now.

She does not have a Web site, blog or Twitter account. She resists television interviews. “It’s degrading,” she said. “They never give you time to talk. I hesitate. I reflect. I contradict myself. Whenever I’ve done it, I was very, very bad. A catastrophe.”

When she speaks, it’s a process of showing and hiding so that her interlocutor can never quite get to know her. She responds in single-word sentences. “Formidable.” “Fantastique.” “Superb.” “Incroyable.” These are among her favorites.

“The interview is a game,” she said. “I try to structure interviews in such a way that I say nothing. It’s better for me to be mysterious.”

Often enough, though, her theatrical characters lose control and say too much. Take the two couples in “God of Carnage,” her satire about the middle class and marriage, who transform into primitive creatures during a span of 90 minutes. Or another pair of couples, in “Life x 3,” who compete ferociously under the guise of a sociable evening. Or the three men in her earlier Tony-winning play, “Art,” the comedy in which the friends fall to arguing so viciously over the purchase of a white-on-white painting by one of their number that they question how they became pals in the first place. A common theme in these plays is the tension between the sadness of the solitary human condition and blundering attempts to find solace in others, a tack often doomed to failure.

Ms. Reza, 52, who was born in France and has two children, is the daughter of a father of Jewish Iranian descent and a Jewish Hungarian mother. She has been quoted as saying that she considers her own humor to be Jewish and her plays tragedies, “funny tragedy,” perhaps, but not pure comedies. Yet she doesn’t complain excessively about the difference between her view and the perception of her as a comic writer.

In her own case, apparently, so deep is the conflict between silence and loquacity that she has made the struggle of a writer to control her persona the theme of her new play. The title, “How You Talk the Game,” is from a quotation in “The Big Room,” a collection of celebrity profiles by Michael Herr and Guy Peellaert and is a variation on the well-known line by the sportswriter Grantland Rice, it’s “not that you won or lost — but how you played the game.”

“How You Talk the Game” is a tightly wound psychological work that centers on verbal play and the strains that arise within a conversation among four people. What matters is not so much the reality of the action, but how the action is described by the characters. The protagonist, a novelist named Nathalie, is giving a public interview about her new book in a fictional French town called Vilan-en-Volène.

The interviewer, a female journalist, asks probing questions that unnerve the novelist. When Nathalie is asked why she accepted the invitation, her facade cracks: “I tell myself, what will you do in Vilan-en-Volène, you cannot go to Vilan-en-Volène, you have no reason to go to this unknown town and discuss a book that you undermine every time you speak, that you diminish every time you speak, that you watch disintegrate the moment someone mentions it to you or you mention it. And yet I cannot not go.”

Like Nathalie, Ms. Reza both hides and reveals herself under layers of beautiful clothes. Ultra-thin and tiny-boned, she exudes vulnerability as she lets her cashmere sweater slip off her shoulders, disclosing a soft, fitted knit dress. She always wears high heels. And she insisted on them while following Mr. Sarkozy.

“We were on farms and running to airports,” she said. “His people told me to wear jeans and gym shoes. I said no. Even when they mocked me, I said no. Firmly.” It was “sartorial obstinacy,” she said.

Nathalie becomes a character who is eerily close to herself.

“I can’t say that I am Nathalie,” she said in the interview, “but I would be dishonest if I said, ‘No, it’s not me at all.’ There certainly are aspects of her character that are truly similar. It’s the first time I have deliberately constructed a character with myself in mind.”

“Art,” Ms. Reza’s breakthrough in the United States in 1998, has been performed in more than 30 languages. It’s not enough. She talks about a fantasy: to have one of her plays performed at the Comédie-Française in Paris.

She has a “scoop,” she said. She is “in conversations” with Muriel Mayette, the administrator of France’s national theater, about a possible production of her new play. She acknowledges that it must undergo a rigorous judging process by committee. But she is excited.

“I’m in the greatest national theaters in the world, but not yet in France’s great national theaters like the Comédie-Française,” she said. “The Comédie-Française. It is a myth.”