Naomi Iizuka is the author of many plays including Polaroid Stories (recipient of the 1998 PEN Center USA West Award for Drama), Language of Angels, War of the Worlds (in collaboration with Anne Bogart and The SITI Company), Skin, and Tattoo Girl. Her work has been produced at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Actor's Theatre of Louisville, Campo Santo + Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco, Dallas Theatre Center, Soho Rep, the Edinburgh Festival, and BAM. Iizuka is the recipient of a Gerbode Foundation Fellowship, an NEA/TCG Artist-in-Residence grant, a McKnight Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, Princeton University's Hodder Fellowship, and a Jerome Playwriting Fellowship. She is a member of New Dramatists.
“With an impressive sleight-of-hand-and-mind, artful minimalism and a visual beauty fully worthy of its many subjects, the contents of Naomi Iizuka’s Concerning Strange Devices From the Distant West somehow coalesce into an ever-shifting yet magically cohesive whole . . . ” —Chicago Sun-Times
" . . . thoughtful, humane, poetically phrased and staged with intricate, shimmering beauty . . . it spun a multi-textured web that became completely engrossing . . . As Iizuka weaves her magical blend of old-fashioned orientalism and modern realism, art-speak and academic jargon, pillow-book poetry and punk rhetoric, she probes the nature of truth and authenticity. Each facet of her 36 Views offers another perspective on the art and artifice of our lives." —The San Francisco Chronicle
"With Language of Angels, Iizuka has created a Rashomonlike meditation on the nature of memory, grief and passing time. To do this, she has taken some of the ghostly structure of the classical Japanese Noh play, recast it in a rural idiom and infused it with a humming, explosive energy—language used like a loaded weapon. She is an important and arresting talent." —Seattle Times
Selected Works
- Print Books
- Playscripts Acting Edition
- Print Books
- Powell's
- Barnes & Noble
- Alibris
- Abe Books