By Terry Hong | Special to AsianWeek
The last time I officially interviewed playwright extraordinaire Naomi Iizuka, I hung up on her. Really, I had a good excuse: Jon Jory (for those who have been under a rock the past 30 years — he’s a major theater god who founded the country’s most important theater fest, the Humana Festival of New American Plays at the Actors Theatre of Louisville) was on the other line, ready to gush about Iizuka.
“I have nothing but vast, unending praise for Naomi,” he said. “She is one of the most important playwrights now writing in their 30s,” he insisted. Plus, he added, Iizuka is indeed the youngest playwright to have three shows produced at Humana (Polaroid Stories in 1997, Aloha, Say the Pretty Girls in 1999 and War of the Worlds in 2000). Even Iizuka couldn’t argue that it was worth the hang-up to hear that kind of adulation.
For such youthful talent, Iizuka swears that she “came to the theater late in life. I didn’t write scripts in high school or college,” she insists. And while she grew up in the D.C. metropolitan area, she says, “My family never went to the theater.” So Iizuka got her undergraduate degree in classics and literature at Yale and even did a year at Yale Law, including a summer as a Wall Street summer associate, before she attempted her own writing. She eventually landed in California and after “a series of unpleasant jobs” in the north, got herself into the MFA program in playwriting at UC San Diego. She then got herself produced, first locally, then nationally. Then came the awards and grants (Whiting, McKnight, NEA/TCG Artist-in-Residence, Jerome, PEN Center), and teaching (University of Iowa, Princeton, University of Texas at Austin, and currently UC Santa Barbara) and basically utter acclaim.
“My life has been a series of felicitous journeys,” says Iizuka. “I’ve been so fortunate in many respects. I’ve been able to work with really great people who are willing to take chances with me, with my work. My work is not safe writing. Sometimes it’s difficult, disturbing, scary. I’ve been so fortunate to have people say to me, ‘I see something in this, it excites me and I want to produce it.’ ”
One of Iizuka’s latest works, 36 Views — some may even call it her breakout piece — is currently making the national rounds. After a highly successful, much-lauded co-production at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in California and the Public Theater in New York City, the play opens anew next week at Rochester’s Geva Theatre Center, in co-production with Portland Center Stage. Under the direction of the multi-talented Chay Yew, himself an acclaimed playwright and director of the Asian American Theatre Workshop at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, the work is an astonishing array of the multiple layers that lie in between pure truth and utter deception. Its plot centers around the discovery of a potentially history-changing “pillow-book,” an ancient royal court diary-of-sorts.
As Director Yew brings his own unique vision to this production: “We are approaching the play in the noh theater aesthetic instead of the kabuki [used in the Berkeley/Public production]. This older theatrical aesthetic allows the actors and the text to evoke the time, the place, the mood and the setting. Essentially, [the play happens on] an empty stage, performed by a company of six actors with only a table, a bench and six chairs to create the numerous locations of the play. Hence it’s a very fluid narrative, and the text — unadorned by the interruption of set pieces and projections — is at the forefront of the play. It allows the play to be experienced and heard fully. This also allows the audience to participate more actively in the production.
“36 Views is an exceptionally deft play,” adds Yew. “It’s witty, intelligent, provocative, moving. It keeps the audience at the edge of their seats till the end of the play.”
AsianWeek: What was your inspiration for this piece?
Naomi Iizuka: I’ve always been intrigued with Hokusai’s “36 Views of Mount Fuji.” I think, in part, because it’s this beautiful and mesmerizing series of images. But also because it’s mysterious. You see the mountain from so many different perspectives — from faraway and close up, at different times of day. Sometimes the mountain is barely visible, and what’s foregrounded is something completely different. And that’s part of the mystery, I think: that the mountain is the constant, and yet it’s never the same. It’s almost as if the more you look at it, the more it eludes you. That fascinated me.
And at the same time, I was thinking a lot about love. Different kinds of love — romantic love, but also the love people can feel towards a work of art or an idea. And then I saw this strange and wonderful movie by Orson Welles called F for Fake. So that was in my head, too, when I started writing. I think that’s what happens for me when I write. These odd bits and pieces come together in way that suddenly makes sense.
AW: Tell me more about your two main women characters — they first appear almost to be two sides of the same coin — the one rebellious and headstrong, the other seemingly traditional and pliant. But then appearances are deceptive …
Iizuka: I think there’s some truth to those descriptions, but I also think both women are more similar than they may seem at first. Both are strong, forceful characters who have to navigate a world where somebody else made the rules.
AW: Do you have a writing process?
Iizuka: I do a lot of research. Different kinds of research, archival research and also interviews. And then I live with the material for a while. I need to swim in it for a while. I listen to tapes I’ve made or I read my notes. I look at photographs. And then a shape begins to emerge, and I begin to make associative connections, and then maybe an image surfaces or I hear a piece of dialogue, and I start writing.
AW: What are you working on now?
Iizuka: I’m working on a piece for Actors Theatre of Louisville. On one level, it’s about a part of Louisville called Butchertown where a lot of the slaughterhouses were located — hence the name — and the people who live there now and lived there in the past — oddly, both Thomas Edison and James Audubon lived in Butchertown at different points. On another level, the piece is about history, about how we perceive history and how we describe our history.
AW: How might this production of 36 Views be different with an APA director, which was not the case with the Berkeley Rep/Public production ....
Iizuka: I’m so excited to be working with Chay. He’s an amazing writer as well as an amazing director. He’s also a dear friend. Your question, though, is so interesting in terms of the play itself. I would answer it this way: I think people are mysterious, and how the different parts of who they are come together and manifest themselves in their lives, in their work, in what and whom they love is impossible to predict. And that unpredictability is, I think, at the core of this play. Chay brings all that he is to his art, but how all the parts of himself manifest in his work is completely singular and original and wonderful.
36 Views runs Feb. 18 to March 23 at Geva Theatre Center in Rochester, N.Y. For more information, call 585-232-1366 or go to www.gevatheatre.org.
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