Yasmina Reza

Yasmina Reza (born May 1, 1959, Paris, France) is a French dramatist, novelist, director, and actress best known for her brief satiric plays that speak to contemporary middle-class anxieties.

Reza was the daughter of Jewish parents who had immigrated to France. Her Iranian father was an engineer, businessman, and a pianist, and her mother was a violinist originally from Budapest. Reza studied at the University of Paris X, Nanterre, and at the drama school of Jacques Lecoq before working as an actress. The first two plays she wrote, both winners of a Molière Award, were Conversations après un enterrement (1986; Conversations After a Burial), involving death and sex, and La Traversée de l’hiver (1989; “Winter Crossing”), about the unlikely friendship that develops between six people spending their vacation at a Swiss mountain resort.

It was Art however, which premiered in 1994, that brought Reza wide notice. In the play three friends quarrel over a work of modern art—which is, in effect, a blank canvas—thereby showing just how fragile friendship can be. The play was in production on major stages worldwide virtually continuously after its opening. It won Molière Awards for best author, play, and production; a British Laurence Olivier Award for best comedy; and a Tony Award for best play. Another hit, L’Homme du hasard (1995; The Unexpected Man), was a two-character play set on a train traveling from Paris to Frankfurt. Following long monologues by a self-absorbed male author and his female seatmate and fan, the play ends with a brief dialogue between the two that centres on people’s need for one another.

Reza’s next play, Trois versions de la vie, showed an awkward situation—a couple arriving a day early for a dinner party—working itself out in three different outcomes. After premiering in Vienna in October 2000, it opened the following month in Paris, with the author in the cast, and in December in London under the title Life × 3. Une Pièce espagnole: théâtre (2004; The Spanish Play), about a cast of actors rehearsing for and appearing in a play written by a Spanish playwright, gives insight into the theatrical world. Following several productions onstage, Reza wrote and directed a screen adaptation, Chicas (2010; “Girls”).

In the satiric comedy Le Dieu du carnage (2006; God of Carnage), Reza focused on two couples who meet to discuss a fight between their young sons. The play made its London debut in 2008 and subsequently won a Laurence Olivier Award. The Broadway production of God of Carnage, which opened a year later, was also critically acclaimed, and it earned a Tony Award for best play. For a 2011 film version (titled Carnage), Reza cowrote the screenplay with Roman Polanski, who also directed. Reza’s later plays include Comment vous racontez la partie (2011; “How You Talk the Game”) and Bella figura (2015; “Beautiful Figure”), which she wrote for the Schaubühne in Berlin and later directed in a 2017 Paris production.

In addition to plays, Reza wrote novels. Her first effort, Hammerklavier (1997), was composed of a series of vignettes inspired by memories of her father. She later wrote Une Désolation (1999; Desolation), a monologue delivered by an elderly man who cannot understand how others can be foolish enough to find happiness in life, and Adam Haberberg (2002), which centres on an unsuccessful, unhappy middle-aged writer whose happenstance encounter with an old friend from high school reminds him of how much his life and his family mean to him. Reza’s later novels include Dans la luge d’Arthur Schopenhauer (2005; “Arthur Schopenhauer’s Sledge”), Heurex les heurex (2013; Happy Are the Happy), and Babylone (2016; Babylon).

In 2007 Reza showed her broad range of talent with the publication of L’Aube le soir ou la nuit (“Dawn Evening or Night”), a detailed biography of Nicolas Sarkozy as he ran for president of France. Reza was given almost unlimited access to a man she saw as talented and power-driven during the time she followed him on the campaign trail, chronicling both his public and his private life.

Reza’s other works include a French translation of a stage adaptation of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis for Polanski, who performed the lead role in Paris in 1988. She also wrote the screenplay for the film Le Pique-nique de Lulu Kreutz (2000; Lulu Kreutz’s Picnic), which was directed by her partner at the time, Didier Martiny. Reza’s autobiography, Nulle Part (“Nowhere”), was published in France in 2005.