May 1 Happy Birthday Yasmina Reza!
Yasmina Reza (born May 1, 1959) French playwright, novelist – Art (1994)
Read about Yasmina Reza here
Read a 2015 interview of Yasmina Reza:
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/02/20/the-fabric-of-a-life-an-interview-with-yasmina-reza/
I wrote a play called Life x 3—it was performed here in New York with John Turturro in the lead role—and it opened with a woman in bed and a man walked in and said:
“He wants cake!”
And the woman replied:
“You know he can’t have cake after he brushed his teeth,”
and the man went on,
“Yes, but he wants cake anyway.”
And the man walked out again. That was the start of the play, and then the kid raised hell for the rest of the night. In France there was a very famous director, Roger Planchon—he has since passed away—who had come to see the play, and after the performance he said, How do you do it? In one sentence you clear the decks, you tell us exactly what we need to know, where we are, who we’re with …
I think my impatience is to blame. Nothing bores me more, in writing, than long introductions, explanations of childhood, that heavy backpack of contextualization. I’m not at all interested in that. In fact, I find that you can get to the point right away through recognizable symptoms, which everyone shares.
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