Jon Jory, founder of the Humana Festival of New American Plays at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, has called Naomi Iizuka “one of the most important playwrights now writing.” Back in 2003, she was also the youngest playwright to have had three shows produced at the Humana Festival. Since then she has had two others produced there, in 2004 and 2007.

Iizuka was born in 1965 in Tokyo. Her mother is an American of Spanish descent, and her father a Japanese banker. She was raised in Japan, Holland, Indonesia, and Washington, D.C. Despite growing up in metropolitan areas, her family did not frequent the theatre, and Iizuka did not begin to write plays until after an undergraduate degree in literature and a year of law school, both at Yale. She eventually ended up in the MFA playwriting program at UC San Diego. Her plays began to be produced locally, then nationally, and the controversial stories have won her acclaim.

Among the many prestigious awards Iizuka has earned are a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Rockefeller Foundation MAP grant, an NEA/TCG Artist-in-Residence grant, a Princeton University’s Hodder Fellowship, a Jerome Playwriting Fellowship, and, just last year, an Alpert Award. Her plays, which have been widely produced, include 36 Views, At the Vanishing Point, Polaroid Stories, Tattoo Girl, 17 Reasons (Why), and Skin. She has taught playwriting at the University of Iowa, Princeton, the University of Texas at Austin and, as of this writing, UC Santa Barbara. In addition to her classes, Iizuka continues to write, with a new play produced this year and three more under commission in Minneapolis, Chicago, and the California Shakespeare Company. She loves her busy lifestyle, carving time to write everyday, whether at home, in a hotel room, or on an airplane.

What Iizuka loves best about teaching is helping her students find their voices. Her own writing seems to extend this courtesy to her characters as well. For starters, many of her plays involved interviews -- with homeless teens, with stockyard workers, etc. -- as part of her process. She feels that if she can “listen hard enough, [she] can apprehend something about history and human experience, some kind of larger, elusive truth.” Once her research is complete, she lives with the material for awhile, listening to it (sometimes literally, in the form of tapes she has made). The resulting plays make the familiar surprising and tell the stories that are hidden within the surface story. As a San Francisco Chronicle review put it, “Iizuka celebrates the struggle and humanity and imploded despair of her characters without sentimentalizing it or condescending.”

Echo is proud to bring you such a fascinating female theatrical voice, one whose passions for listening and unearthing the hidden truths in received history are so like our own.

Sources -- UCSB Press Release: “Busy UCSB Playwright Honored with Alpert Award in the Arts.” May 16, 2005; CalArts Press Release: “Alpert Award in Theatre: Naomi Iizuka”; and Hong, Terry. “The Hidden Landscapes of Naomi Iizuka’s Luminous 36 Views” Asian Week.com, Feb. 14-20, 2003.

[December 2006]

Return to ECHO READS... History