Going Beyond Laughs

PARIS — 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."