ABOUT THE PLAY
Produced in France and then in London in 2000, Life x3 is, as Ben Brantley observed, “a fugue-like consideration of two haute bourgeois couples, who act out three different versions of the same disastrous dinner party(NY Times).”

Celebrated in its London national Theatre production, this play demands great skill from the four actors who must play with human variables of character as iteration shifts the balance of power and outcome of the “evening” among the couples.

Henry, a research astrophysicist and his wife Sonia, a lawyer are the unwitting and unwilling hosts for Hubert and Inez, a more successful colleague of Henry’s and his aggrieved wife who arrive for dinner on the wrong night.

To add to the dynamics and frustrations of the situation, Henry and Sonia’s 6 year old son, Arnaud, keeps interrupting with distractions from his “off-stage” bedroom. With each successive version of the evening, Reza increases the rivalries, the frustrations, and the wistful qualities of human dynamics.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in 1959 Paris to Jewish parents – a father of Russian and Iranian heritage and a Hungarian mother, Yasmina Reza is an active novelist as well as a playwright and the mother of two children. And while she has had exceptional success in both genres, Reza began her professional career as an actress, appearing in both contemporary works and the classics of Moliere and Marivaux.

Her first play (1987) was Conversations After a Burial which won numerous prizes for new talent across Europe and in South America. She then translated Kafka’s Metamorphosis for Roman Polanski and authored a second play, Winter Crossing (1990). She went on to The Unexpected Man and then Art; the later won the Oliver Award and Evening Standard Award (1996/7) and a Tony (1998).

Despite the laughter her stage works produce, she sees her plays as “tragedy, funny tragedy. Art is heartbreaking.” Life X 3 (2000) and A Spanish Play (2004) are her most recent stage pieces and she has also published “L’Aube, le Soir ou la Nuit” (Dawn Evening or Night) – her “sensational “study of Nicolas Sarkozy’s pursuit of the French presidency.

Her most recent work is The God of the Carnage (2007) which opened in Zurich and has gone on to win the Viennese Nestroy-Theatreprize. Caryn James (The New York Times) describes her as “a born satirist, a gifted and wry observer of the absurdities and feints of social life… and of the small deceptions that help us all survive.” James goes on to assert that Reza is a “mini-Proust, grasping at immense themes that elude her: the slipstream of time, the isolations of individuals and especially of artists.”

She has been fortunate in her English language translator – Christopher Hampton, a noted English playwright – who is credited by actors and critics alike with a fine flair for language and the nuances of male badinage.

ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
For director Valerie Rachelle, Life X 3 reveals “the absurdities of social life and the small self-deceptions that help us all survive.” Through Reza’s three time enactment of this evening of entertaining, she enables a contemporary audience to see “ourselves on any give night in domesticity.”

We can laugh at the ridiculous behaviors in which we engage be it about parenting, careers, social positions, and learn from “the moments of greed, lust and bitterness” that are reflected and that we know we all carry.

The production elements of setting, lights, sound, and costume combine to reveal “what is underneath theses masks of social graces” which we all recognize and wear.