Naomi Iizuka Selected Works

Witness the story of 12-year-old Ben Uchida, a Japanese-American boy whose life is changed forever following the World War II attack on Pearl Harbor. When the U.S. government forces Japanese-American citizens into incarceration camps, Ben and his family must face difficult truths about the idea of home. One young person’s struggle to understand a society allowing mass discrimination against its citizens poses questions as urgent today as they were in the past. 

It begins with light, a sliver, a flash, then comes a sound, a pulse, a beat, a crash like a giant hammer smashing through the sky. Thus, the story of Boom, the son of Thunder, begins as he sets out on an epic search for his father, ultimately discovering his true self and the strength within him that always existed. This mythical adventure will transport you and your child on a fantastic journey where the littlest things can make all the difference in the world. A play for yound audiences and their families.

Something happened to Chloe after that party last Saturday night; the problem is, she can’t remember anything. And everybody at high school is talking about what happened. Was she raped? Did she ask for it? How could those boys do that to her? Or did they? Set in a high school in the American mid-west, in a world of Facebook, Twitter, smart phones and YouTube, Good Kids explores the very public aftermath of a sex crime and its cover-up. Who’s telling the truth? Whose version of the story do you believe; and what does that say about you? Loosely based on the Steubenville High School rape case, Good Kids is provocative, haunting and stunningly current.

Good Kids is the first work of a New Play Initiative established by the Big Ten Theatre Consortium. This collaboration among university theatre departments will commission, produce, and publicize a series of new plays by female playwrights, with a secondary goal of creating strong female roles.

Well before the digital age, the camera selected, filtered and obscured the truth——even as it promised to provide an authentic look at distant lands. Naomi Iizuka explores the intersection of art and authenticity in a haunting play commissioned by Berkeley Rep: Concerning Strange Devices from the Distant West.

Taking its title from a treatise on photography translated into Japanese, the play shifts between the present and the 1880s when a weird new technology first seized the world in freeze frame. Cameras capture images of geishas, monks and shrines and send them to the future in a flash——where we continue to seek meaning through lenses of exoticism and xenophobia. The intricate parts of this world premiere nestle together like a delicate puzzle… . . . or erotic glimpses of an enigmatic tattoo. Expose yourself to the mystery of Strange Devices.

In this acclaimed play, Naomi Iizuka has created a carefully textured exploration of the meaning of truth—not just in the art world but in the human heart as well.

Taking its title from the series of woodblock prints by nineteenth-century Japanese artist Hokusai (which, contrary to their label, consists of 46 images of Mount Fuji), 36 Views unfolds in a series of 36 scenes and moments. The story has several threads, but at its heart is fairly simple. An art dealer and an art historian discover what they think is an ancient manuscript—a priceless Japanese pillow book—and try to learn whether it's authentic. Their search becomes an erotic game of greed, love, and mental hide-and-seek as the play explores the relationships between feelings and words, objects and photographs of objects, antiques and perfect copies, and a woman's heritage and her physical features.
 

Hamlet: Blood in the Brain relocates Shakespeare's kingdom of Elsinore to the drug-ravaged world of the Oakland, California community in the late 1980s. Focusing on the intense sociological pressures that occur in a community following an extreme act of violence, the play tells the story of one man confronted by sudden loss who must uphold the status of his community and his own corrupted lineage. As reflected in the title, the piece brings us inside his mind and body to feel his blood boiling, his heart racing, and the inevitability of his encroaching madness.

A visceral blend of classical mythology and real life stories told by street kids, Naomi lizuka's Polaroid Stories journeys into a dangerous world where myth-making fulfills a fierce need for transcendence, where storytelling has the power to transform a reality in which characters' lives are continually threatened, devalued and effaced. Not all the stories these characters tell are true; some are lies, wild yams, clever deceits, baroque fabrications. But whether or not a homeless kid invents an incredible history for himself isn't the point, explains diarist-of-the-street Jim Grimsley. "All these stories and lies add up to something like the truth."

Inspired in part by Ovid's Metamorphoses, Iizuka's Polaroid Stories takes place on an abandoned pier on the outermost edge of a city, a way stop for dreamers, dealers and desperadoes, a no-man's land where runaways seek camaraderie, refuge and escape. Serpentine routes from the street to the heart characterize the interactions in this spellbinding tale of young people pushed to society's fringe. Informed, as well, by interviews with young prostitutes and street kids, Polaroid Stories conveys a whirlwind of psychic disturbance, confusion and longing. Like their mythic counterparts, these modern-day mortals are engulfed by needs that burn and consume. Their language mixes poetry and profanity, imbuing the play with lyricism and great theatrical force.

Featured in the 1999 Humana Festival of New American Plays, Aloha, Say the Pretty Girls is a quirky journey that follows a bunch of twenty-somethings in their quest for love and identity. Strangers, friends, lovers, and acquaintances travel the globe from Alaska to Hawaii and from New York City to Inner Borneo, exploring themes of migration, evolution, and interconnectivity. Babies, wild dogs, komodo dragons, and hula dancers abound in this hilarious play about finding your tribe in a world gone haywire.