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.

Somewhere in America, there's a New Girl at the high school who may or may not be a robot. Freak explores the Pygmalion myth through skateboards, chewing gum, rockers, swimmers, poets, and a wild cafeteria dance number. In a world of high achievers and drama kids who want to change their world, New Girl wonders if she'll ever be more than a Freak. (This play was specially commissioned by Playscripts for high school actors.) Co-written with Ryan Pavelchik.

An eerie cycle of ghost stories, set in the cave country of North Carolina. After a young girl is lost in a cave on the edge of town, there is a Rashomon-like investigation of her disappearance and the fate of those who survive her.

In this adaptation of Donald Barthelme's short story "Perpetua," a trumpet player and a tattooed pinup girl navigate a chaotic world populated by hops farmers, cathedral builders, and an aging Nadia Comaneci, all in pursuit of a little happiness.

In the urban sprawl of Los Angeles, three diverse families each carry a dream, but a recent shooting creates an unexpected seismic shift that rocks each family'’s foundation. Faults that were once inactive or dormant suddenly appear and abruptly change the way they think about themselves, their community and their dream.

His radio broadcast War of the Worlds sent Americans into hysterical panic. He took Hollywood by storm with Citizen Kane, a larger-than-life film about a mover-and-shaker not so very different from himself. Mercurial, controversial, inspiring, infuriating—Orson Welles entranced and enraged everyone. His fall from grace mirrored the magnitude of his talent—and the massiveness of an ego steered straight to self-destruction. Director Anne Bogart, her remarkable SITI Company, and playwright Naomi Iizuka join forces to explore the myth and myth-maker, charlatanism and genius of Orson Welles.