PARIS - Yasmina Reza is one of the world’s most successful playwrights, but she wears her fame with discomfort. She can talk at length about her red leather Prada coat. She can relate stories with biting humor about her year on the road shadowing Nicolas Sarkozy in his 2007 campaign for the French presidency. But ask her about herself, and the anxiety of the writerly persona takes over.

A blend of fragility and steel, Ms. Reza wavers between extremes: a determination to be judged by her work alone and a desire that it be understood and appreciated. The publication of her new play, “Comment Vous Racontez la Partie” (“How You Talk the Game”), has propelled her, once again, to face a reporter. “After I write, I have nothing to say,” she said . “The commentary afterwards is superfluous. I write. And that’s enough.”

But then she has something to say, criticizing journalists who probe too deeply. “Too often what are described as interviews are inquisitions,” she said. “It’s not about the work. It’s more like, ‘Who are you?,’ which really, really annoys me. If I didn’t have to do them, I wouldn’t. ”

But Ms. Reza is in the spotlight again, and not only because of the new play. In October the film “Carnage,” directed by her friend Roman Polanski and based on her 2009 Tony Award-winning play, “God of Carnage,” will be released.

And there has been speculation that “G” - the man, believed to be her lover, to whom she dedicated “Dawn Dusk or Night,” her bestselling book about Mr. Sarkozy - might be Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former International Monetary Fund chief who stands accused of sexually assaulting a hotel maid in New York. Ms. Reza had no comment about that controversy now.

When she speaks, it’s a process of showing and hiding . She responds in single-word sentences.
“Formidable.” “Fantastique.” “Superb.” “Incroyable.”

“The interview is a game,” she said. “I try to structure interviews in such a way that I say nothing. It’s better for me to be mysterious.”

Often enough, though, her theatrical characters say too much. Take the three men in her early play, “Art.” They fall to arguing so viciously over the purchase of a whiteon- white painting that they question how they became pals in the first place. A common theme in her plays is the tension between the sadness of the solitary human condition and blundering attempts to find solace in others.

So deep is the conflict between silence and loquacity in her own case that Ms. Reza has made the struggle of a writer to control her persona the theme of “How You Talk the Game,” in which a novelist named Nathalie is giving a public interview about her new book.

Ms. Reza, 52 and a mother of two, is ultra-thin and tiny-boned. She exudes vulnerability as she lets her cashmere sweater slip off her shoulders, disclosing a soft, fitted knit dress. She always wears high heels. And she insisted on them while following Mr. Sarkozy.

“We were on farms and running to airports,” she said.“His people told me to wear jeans and gym shoes. I said no. ” It was “sartorial obstinacy,” she said.

“Art,” Ms. Reza’s international breakthrough in the late 1990s , has been performed in more than 30 languages. It’s not enough. She is in talks to realize one more ambition: to have one of her plays performed at the Comedie-Francaise in Paris.

“I’m in the greatest national theaters in the world, but not yet in France’s great national theaters like the Comedie-Francaise,” she said.


By ELAINE SCIOLINO