Iizuka’s plays, such as Aloha Say All the Pretty
Girls (1999), often feature travel as a central cata-
lyst for self-transformation. However, in her other
works such as Language of Angels (2000) set in
Tennessee’s cave country where a girl’s disappear-
ance continues to haunt her friends, Iizuka focuses
on the intersection between voices of a commu-
nity and their locale. Her 17 Reasons Why! (2002),
which borrows its title from a fragment of a neigh-
borhood shop sign, offers a study of San Francis-
co’s Mission District from its Gold Rush days to its
present, unfolded in 17 loosely connected scenes
based on its residents’ oral histories. Iizuka further
investigates how history is perceived and described
in At the Vanishing Point (2004), a site-specific pro-
duction staged in an abandoned warehouse and
delivered through interlocking monologues. In it,
the playwright employs interviews and archival
research to bring to life Butchertown, a stockyard
and meat-packing plant community near Louis-
ville, Kentucky.
The hallmark of Iizuka’s interests in the junc-
ture between modern and classical voices can be
found in Hamlet: Blood in the Brain (2006). The
culmination of a three-year-long collaboration
involving traditional theater organizations and
the communities of Oakland, California, Hamlet:
Blood in the Brain synthesizes residents’ stories
and culture with William Shakespeare’s venerable
tragedy to envision Hamlet’s society and crises
emerging from modern-day Oakland’s local idi-
oms and mythology.
Despite her brief career, Iizuka has been pro-
lific and widely honored by institutions such as
the Rockefeller Foundation, PEN Center USA, the
Joyce Foundation, and the National Endowment
for the Arts. Her productivity and originality por-
tend a greater presence in the canon of American
literature and theater. At present, Naomi Iizuka is
a professor of dramatic arts at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, and serves as the direc-
tor of its playwriting program.
Bibliography
Berson, M. “Naomi Iizuka: Raising the Stakes.” Amer-
ican Theatre 15, no. 7 (September 1998): 56–7.
Iizuka, Namoi. “Interview with Naomi Iizuka, play-
wright of 36 Views, by Cindy Yoon.” (March 29,
2002). AsiaSource: A Resource of the Asia Society.
Available online. URL: http://www.asiasource.org/
arts/36views.cfm Accessed Feb. 20, 2006.
Miyagawa, Chiori. “Brave, Bold, and Poetic: The
New Generation of Asian American Women
Playwrights.” In Women Playwrights of Diversity.
A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, by Jane T. Pe-
terson and Suzanne Bennett. Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 1997.
Wren, Celia. “Navigating alien worlds,” American
Theatre 19, no. 2 (February 2002): 32.
M. Gabot FabrosInada, Lawson Fusao (1938– )
Born in Fresno, California, Inada is a third-gen-
eration Japanese American whose grandparents
immigrated to the United States at the turn of the
20th century. Eventually settling in California’s
Great Central Valley region, his paternal grandpar-
ents, the Inadas, worked as sharecroppers in and
around San Jose while his maternal grandparents,
the Saitos, opened Fresno’s first fish market. Both
families believed in upward mobility and instilled
a love of education in their nisei children. Subse-
quently, Fusaji Inada, a dentist, and Masako Saito, a
schoolteacher, provided these same values to their
son Lawson in a stable and warm home located on
Fresno’s ethnically diverse West Side.
In February 1942, two months after the Japanese
attacked Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt
signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the
removal of all people of Japanese ancestry from
vulnerable areas of the United States’s West Coast.
Forced to sell their home and to abandon most of
their belongings, the Inadas were interned for three
years, first in Arkansas’s Jerome Camp and then in
Colorado’s Amache Camp. Although a small child
during internment, Inada’s poetic themes derive
largely from this experience. Today he prefers the
moniker “camp poet” to Japanese-American poet
since much of his work expresses the disorienting
effects of internment and its racist cause.Inada, Lawson Fusao 123