The Americanization of Yasmina Reza

The work of translators—like David Ives for the upcoming A Spanish Play—has kept her plays popular in the U.S.

By David Ng

Quick: Write down all of the living, non-English-language playwrights you can think of whose works are regularly performed in the U.S. and who can sell out a Broadway house. Chances are your list will be short, very short, and will contain the name of French writer Yasmina Reza.

In the insular world of American theatre, Reza's success stands as a double anomaly. Not only is she the rare non-Anglophone dramatist to have scaled the summit of this country's stage honors, winning a Tony for her hit comedy Art (1998), but she's also a living writer and can therefore enjoy her success. This is no small achievement. We Americans, for whom non-English theatre usually means Chekhov, Ibsen, Brecht, etc., still prefer our foreign playwrights safely dead and buried. (Reza was 38 when Art opened in New York. She currently lives in Paris.)

This month, Reza's newest work, A Spanish Play, makes its English-language debut at Classic Stage Company in New York, in a translation by American playwright David Ives. It will be the fourth play by Reza to hit these shores, following Art, The Unexpected Man and Life x 3. The starry production features Zoe Caldwell, Linda Emond, Denis O'Hare, Larry Pine and Katherine Borowitz. It's directed by John Turturro.

A Spanish Play is a meta-drama about a group of five actors rehearsing a foreign play (a Spanish one) that they will stage in their native language (French). Which is to say, they are performing a play in translation. For American audiences, the actors won't be speaking Spanish or French, but English, which is of course what is always spoken in Reza's plays when they're performed in the U.S.

The popularity of Yasmina Reza owes much to the translators of her plays. Their thankless work makes it possible for that other form of "translation" to take place—the acceptance of a foreign playwright by an American audience. Reza's work is undeniably "French"—intellectual, declamatory, minimalist—and yet theatre audiences in places like Florida and Oklahoma welcome her like a hometown favorite. Her plays have that uncanny ability to feel completely foreign and completely American at the same time. To experience them (especially A Spanish Play) is to witness a fascinating triple exposure of languages, cultures and theatrical sensibilities.

Those who know Yasmina Reza describe her as difficult, feisty, impatient and a little bit bossy. She had rejected the first English translation of A Spanish Play, which was written by a non-playwright. The new translator, David Ives, who is best known for his one-act comedies, agreed to the job last spring. His first phone chat with Reza in July began with a short question.

"Did you laugh?" Reza asked.

Those three simple words puzzled Ives. "This play isn't a comedy, though that was how it was described to me by my agent," Ives recalled later during an interview. "He said, 'She has a comedy.' So maybe my expectations about it were skewed."

And did he laugh? "I told her that there's a lot of humor, though it's Chekhovian character humor," says Ives. "It's not ha-ha funny. It's heh-heh funny."

At the end of the conversation, Reza offered a word of advice. "You don't have to be literal," she told Ives.

And that was that. Ives spent the next six weeks reading and re-reading the play, taking notes and reading it some more. Structurally, A Spanish Play is a tricky contraption. It alternates between a play-within-the-play and a series of monologues during which the actors contemplate their craft. Gradually, the two separate halves start to bleed into each other until it's impossible to tell which layer the actors are inhabiting.

"The play took over my life, in a way," Ives says. "I actually had a dream in which I was leading Yasmina Reza, guiding her by hand, out of a very large and complicated building."

Ives had just completed a translation of Georges Feydeau's A Flea in Her Ear for the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. (His adaptation won a Jeff Award in November.) The experience of translating a dead writer versus a living one was huge, he says. "I could bend Feydeau to my own purposes if I wanted to. But here, I felt this almost crushing obligation to honor her intentions." At the same time, he didn't want to slavishly adhere to the text. "I wanted to make it a play in English, for Americans," he adds.

Ironically, the first dilemma arose concerning the very first line of the play: "Les acteurs sont des lâches." ("Actors are cowards.") "I thought I had a brilliant idea for that," said Ives. His immediate instinct was: "Actors? Actors are cowards." "It has a bite to it that you can't get in English with 'Actors are cowards,'" Ives explains. "If you add 'Actors?' it's like a fanfare, a tiny little trumpet note that makes the audience sit up and also makes them understand that the actor is in some sort of conversation. And it announces the theme of the entire play."

But Ives was unsure. "I thought, Yasmina's going to see this translation and I can't screw with the first line," he says.

So he put it aside. After a reading in August, he was discussing the play with Turturro. "I told [John] I had a different idea for the first line and when I told him, he said that I had to do it. He said, it's so much better." So, Ives restored his initial translation, which was eventually approved by Reza.

Another problem arose: what to do about the play's layers of nationalities. In the past, the characters in Reza's plays have always remained French when performed in translation. But in the case of A Spanish Play, that leap of imagination could prove especially disorienting for viewers.

"It would mean American actors playing French actors playing Spanish characters," says Ives. To simplify things, he cut out the middle man, making the play about American actors. "For example, 'Françoise' I made 'Frances,' because the moment she says 'Françoise,' the audience will be taken out of the play," explains Ives. "I talked about it with the actors and they agreed with me. Turturro seemed to agree with that as well." (Reza also approved this change.)

The linguistic alchemy that goes into (re-)producing Reza's plays for U.S. audiences is mysterious and complex. Those who have immersed themselves in her work, whether as translators, producers or directors, point to different subtleties that make Reza's words ideal for export.

"She usually takes a small facet of life and goes in-depth into that, rather than taking a huge problem and trying to cover lots of ground," says Frank Heibert, who has translated Reza's writing into German. "She approaches problems of the human soul in a way we haven't seen or read from 50,000 other writers. But it's not so particular that you would feel puzzled. I think there's an entertaining aspect to all of her theatre—but it's never hollow, flat entertainment where you forget it right away."

British playwright Christopher Hampton has translated four of Reza's plays. "I think she has an absolutely recognizable and distinctive voice. It's almost as distinctive as Harold Pinter. It couldn't be anybody else," he says. "She deals with things other playwrights are nervous of, that kind of middle-class theorization, which is very French—but she's made it her own." At one point, Hampton resisted pressure from producers to change the setting of Art to London and to make the characters English. "I argued strongly against that because I thought, it's absolutely, quintessentially a play about French people," he says. (Hampton was supposed to translate A Spanish Play, but scheduling difficulties got in the way.)

When Art and Life x 3 were debuting on Broadway, Hampton and Reza flew to New York to work on Americanizing the language. They collaborated with the actors to add American slang and speech rhythms. During rehearsals, a curious thing emerged. Reza found that the American amendations were somehow closer to the French than the British versions. According to Hampton, she said they had the direct, straightforward simplicity that she likes.

Reza told the New York Times in 2000: "It's a very Jewish way of speaking to be non-explicative, very rapid, incisive.... Straight to the point, no wasting of time." (Reza is of Jewish descent, with Hungarian, Russian and Iranian blood.)

Ives notes that Reza writes challenging monologues that give actors a chance to strut their stuff. "The truth is that half the reason her plays get done is because actors want to do them," he says. "Her plays are so chewy for actors. I think that colleges want to get their fingers into Life x 3 because it's the kind of intellectual card game that students like to do. There's a crackling surface there for a performer." (Reza, who began her career as an actor, starred in the original Paris production of Life x 3 in 2000. She most recently performed on stage in October in an adaptation of her book In Arthur Schopenhauer's Sled.)

In the U.S. and Canada, Reza is popular with regional theatres. Together, her plays have seen close to 170 professional productions in these countries since 1998, according to data from Dramatists Play Service. Her most popular work by far remains Art, which has had almost 150 productions in North America.

Theatre companies cite practical, even mundane reasons for Reza's widespread popularity. The Heller Theatre in Tulsa, Okla., recently produced The Unexpected Man, a two-character drama that Reza wrote in 1995. "Our set was just two benches that we bought at a hardware store," says Julie Tattershall, the theatre's artistic director. "It was a low-maintenance production." She added that regional theatres with small budgets can afford to produce Reza's plays because they don't require large casts and have a "black box" visual aesthetic.

The Banyan Theater Company in Sarasota, Fla., mounted a production of Life x 3 last year. "Reza has an inherent knowledge of how things work on a stage," says artistic director Gil Lazier. "I think audiences accept the intellectual-ness of her plays because her sense of the theatre is so natural. Of course, it helps us a great deal that most of her plays take place on one set."

It's often said that comedy is the most difficult thing to translate to another language. But the often hilarious plays of Yasmina Reza are an exception to that generality. If anything, they become funnier when performed in English.

When Reza attended the London premiere of Art, she was startled by the amount of laughter in the audience. In France, audiences hadn't laughed nearly as much or as loudly.

"What have you done?" she asked Christopher Hampton after the curtain.

"I guess the English find Art much more amusing than the French," he said.

Americans do, too. Anyone who attended the Broadway run of Art (which starred Alan Alda, Victor Garber and Alfred Molina) can attest to the convulsive, almost uncontrollable laughter. The play is about three middle-aged friends whose relationship is put to the test when one of them buys an all-white painting. During one performance, Molina had to pause briefly to stifle his own giggles.

In 1999, Reza explained her dismay to the Los Angeles Times. "I would not say I'm not happy to see people laugh, but I would like them to laugh at the right moments," she said. "But you can't direct an audience; they do what they want."

Her fascination with audience behavior has worked its way into A Spanish Play. At one point in the play-within-the-play, the mother (Zoe Caldwell) asks her youngest daughter (Katherine Borowitz), who is an actress, about the movie she's starring in. "Are there any laughs?" she asks. "Not a one," the daughter replies. "Too bad," the mother retorts. "People like a good laugh."

Ives says transposing Reza's sense of humor to American English proved somewhat difficult because she writes long, complicated sentences punctuated with commas. "I don't think jokes happen on commas," Ives ventures. "I think jokes happen on periods, because after the period comes the laugh. So I had to almost bury the jokes within the commas, in a funny way, and hope that would all sort itself out. I read my translation out loud to myself just to make sure once an actor had studied it a bit, my rhythm would become clear, because in my mind, there are periods in there."

Brian Kulick, the artistic director of Classic Stage, says Reza was thrilled when Ives came on board. "There was an immediate affinity with the work. The metabolic rate of both of them is quixotic," says Kulick. He added that he too laughed when he first read the play. "It's very funny, and Yasmina thinks it's one of her funniest plays."

Critics, especially those in France, tend to be far less amused with Reza's work. When A Spanish Play was first performed in 2004, the critic for Libération wrote that Reza has "a way of suggesting depth while she actually has little to say." The reviewer for Le Figaro was also unimpressed: "We were expecting Pirandellian vertigo. What we got are Russian dolls that have already been unpackaged for us."

Reza may be that rare breed of artist (like jazz musician Charlie Parker and director Akira Kurosawa) who is more popular internationally than at home. Her most recent play, Le dieu du carnage, had its world premiere in December not in France, but in Zurich, Switzerland, where it was performed in a German translation.

A review in Le Monde summarized Reza's peculiar place in French theatre: "She is the most-performed French dramatist abroad, where she has won prestigious awards and has obtained considerable success. But at home, she has never benefited from the recognition of the intellectual or artistic communities, which have relegated her to the world of private theatre." (In France, the state is still the official arbiter and subsidizer of the theatre community.)

"Yasmina refuses to be part of the Parisian theatre social scene," says one colleague. "She doesn't go out to dinner with critics or directors. She's not part of the club, so to speak, and she doesn't want to be. She's very reclusive in her life, and the scene doesn't forgive that."

In October, a full three months before A Spanish Play was to begin previews, Ives was putting in some changes that he received from Reza. They were mostly minor matters of word choice. But there was one alteration that stood out. For one scene, Ives had changed an early speech in which there's a lot of talk about people who haven't been introduced yet.

"Turturro wanted to clarify it after we heard it read," explains Ives. "He thought that was a crucial point for the audience to get into the play and learn who everyone is and get all the relationships straight. So I clarified it—and Yasmina wanted it unclarified. Maybe because I'm an American playwright, I have this anxiety that people won't know what I'm talking about or what my characters are talking about, so I feel that clarity is of the essence."

Ives said he expects the play to run 90 minutes without intermission. The German version ran three hours and a recent Polish production of the play took three-and-a-half. "The pauses in Poland are very long," Ives said, only half joking. In the stage directions for A Spanish Play, Reza writes: "[T]his text indicates (almost) none of the indispensable pauses and silences." Later, one character repeats that sentiment in a monologue: "Words are the parentheses of silence."

If a pause is a non-word, how do you translate it? Is it even possible? More than an act of ventriloquism, translating often requires the writer to channel the playwright's unarticulated sensibility, to reproduce the silences sandwiched in between and sometimes hidden beneath those words.

"It's like archaeology," says Erika Rundle, an assistant professor of theatre arts at Mount Holyoke College, who has translated the works of French playwright Marie Ndiaye, a contemporary of Reza. "You're digging your way word by word into the subtext of the play. If you're lucky and the playwright is good, then the play is constructed from that deep place. Then you work your way back up using the English language."

Speaking of silences, Reza didn't respond to interview requests for this article. She never gives phone interviews, according to her agent, and she hates e-mail. Perhaps Reza was following the advice of one of her characters in A Spanish Play: "An actor's job is to annihilate the writer."

In the French magazine L'Express in 2000, Reza explained why she's usually publicity shy. "I'm one of those writers who works on her own stuff and speaks about herself through the voice of her characters. When I write, I'm really exposing who I am, but I remain masked, and I get to choose the mask that represents me. In an interview, it's you who gets to choose, and I have to appear naked, unveiled, without defenses." She added: "I've always had the feeling that what I was writing was a piece of my flesh, and so I was never able to sell that nor myself."

David Ng is a 2006-07 American Theatre Affiliated Writer, with support from a grant by the Jerome Foundation.