Life x 3

Life x 3 by Yasmina Re’za is a play about nothing that is about everything. A mix-up with the date means Sonia and Henry are caught off guard and must scramble to entertain Inez and Hubert. The night ends on a bad note, but then it starts again rewinding in time to before Hubert and Inez’s arrival. The second iteration of the evening ends with Henry rebelling, and then the evening starts over again. The same scenario plays out three times in total, each with a different ending.

Some themes include monotony vs. change, the mercurial nature of luck, and the chaos of life, all themes that resonate with an audience of college students, people in the midst of transitioning and navigating opportunities and challenges. The play entirely centers on the same beginning scenario which then dramatically diverges, not unlike the simultaneous familiarity and novelty each new year brings. More pointedly, the sudden twists speak to the constant adaptation to the largely unpredictable circumstances the pandemic has posed.

We can do everything correctly (good grades, the right internships, and connections) and still fail - or miraculously succeed; it is such an uncertain time. Henry’s anxieties about publishing and putting art out to be criticized are likely to strongly resonate. His fear of giving it his all but failing is a relatable fear for anyone. Henry’s desperation to publish as a means of making sense of his existence likely parallels the human experience of wrestling with how to make meaning of your life. Publishing for him is about being the first and being seen as impressive. He wants to publish so he can get a promotion but never do they state stakes beyond Henry’s own self-fulfillment-the work he loved has become a means to an end. The play’s structure is deeply embedded in relationships and they present significant sources of change, growth, and constraint.

I connected with this play through the themes of change, growth, luck, and chaos, but mainly I was drawn to its depiction of humanity. I strongly believe that there is no incorrect way to be human. Any human action can be understood and appreciated as an emotional display. I believe there is an undeniable worth in rawness. Characters, or depictions, that honor that complexity and invite the audience to sympathize with unexpected people do us all a service. Within the scenes, Re’za explores at least a dozen different ways to be a person all while demonstrating that those ways of being are still only a part of who a person is. The characters are the same, they do not feel foreign act to act, it is simply that different stimuli yield different choices and responses. I personally viewed it through optimistic nihilism.

The changes only seem large under the microscope of the audience. Whether or not Arnaud gets an apple is immaterial anywhere except the stage. The everyday choices are given weight as the audience watches the ramification ripple out in contrast to other patterns they have witnessed in previous scenes. There is an evident cause and effect of the scene even if it is ultimately meaningless in the characters’ lives as the scene erases itself in an infinite loop.