Anon(ymous) by Naomi Iizuka

Director’s Note

“The dramatic reconfigurations of ideas about homeland, nation, and adopted country have created new dilemmas about how communities perform cultural citizenship in conditions of transnational migrancy”—May Joseph (in Nomadic Identities: The Performance of Citizenship 1999: 69).

Naomi Iizuka’s Anon(ymous) is a poetic story of a young boy, Anon, a refugee who has fled to America from some war torn land separated from his mother and family loosely based on Homer’s Odyssey. Iizuka writes, “When I was creating the play, I very much wanted it to be a sensory experience that would contain within it all the sights and sounds of many different kinds of Americas – whether that’s a family-run Indian restaurant or the desert landscape on the border of Mexico” (American Theatre 2007).  The play encapsulates several provocative contemporary themes such as cultural displacement, border crossings, war, immigration, sweatshops, and the struggle to find one’s identity in the midst of unstable transnational shifts and forced relocation.                         --Rachel Bowditch