Naomi Iizuka, 38, is no stranger to the Humana Festival of New American Plays, held each year in Louisville, KY. She has had four of her works produced here in the past eight years. Her most recent piece, At the Vanishing Point, was part of the 28th Humana Festival in April 2004.
Iizuka (rhymes with "bazooka") also has written 36 Views; Language of Angels; Polaroid Stories; War of the Worlds (co-written with Anne Bogart and SITI); Aloha, the Pretty Girls: Tattoo Girl and Skin. Her plays have been produced by Berkeley Repertory, the Public, GeVa, Campo Santo, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Dallas Theater Center, and Soho Repertory. She is currently writing commissioned works for a number of regional theaters, including the Mark Taper Forum (Los Angeles), the Goodman (Chicago), the California Shakespeare Festival, and the Guthrie (Minneapolis).
At the Vanishing Point is a community portrait of a once-bustling district in Louisville. Called Butchertown, this was a blue-collar meatpacking area. It had a variety of other thriving businesses, too, such as a factory where women painted tiny pigs and chickens on pottery for tourists. However, most of the men who lived here worked in the slaughtering houses. Some of them were second and third-generation meatpacking workers.
SIEGEL: How did you conduct your research for At the Vanishing Point?
IIZUKA: I spent several months here, conducting interviews with dozens of Butchertown residents. Many of them were older persons. What I tried to bring out is that everyone featured in the play is basically a good person, although a complicated one. I did go on a number of site visits, too. For instance, I went to a closed meatpacking plant, and one of the people who used to work there told me about how the process worked.
SIEGEL: Why did you make your play difficult for audiences to follow? Why didn't you focus on just one family, or make your play linear in concept?
IIZUKA: (Laughs). Yes, I do demand that audiences listen attentively, don't I? Well, that's intentional. Some of the connections between the characters you make right away, and others you won't. I feel strongly that real life works that way. You're only getting a partial picture of the whole. I wanted the play to be revealed to the audience the way one looks at a family photo album. Eventually, you look at someone's photo and say, 'Oh, that's who that person is.'
SIEGEL: Are the characters in your play real or fictional?
IIZUKA: They are mostly composites drawn from my interviews. However, some of their words are drawn directly from what people told me in the interviews. There's one guy who recalls the day he asked for a job at a meatpacking plant. The manager told him, 'I'm not looking for someone who wants a job. I'm looking for someone who wants to work.' That's better than anything I could make up.
SIEGEL: What did the local community think of your play?
IIZUKA: I've gotten a lot of positive feedback, and I'm proud to say every performance was sold out. In fact, a number of the people who came to see it had never been to a play before. But they were curious about how their story was being told onstage. My sense is that they enjoyed it quite a bit, especially when they heard the names of places and streets they recognized. One group of little old ladies who had worked at the Hadley ceramics factory laughed a lot when we got to that part of the story. That was very gratifying.
SIEGEL: Why is your play called At the Vanishing Point? I realize that an area called "the point" is a well-known location in Louisville.
IIZUKA: Yes, part of the title is taken from a particular locale known as "the point," and there are several references to this area throughout the play. However, it can also be taken in a broader sense -- a 'vanishing point' suggests something that disappears ... a sense of change ... of jobs moving away ... of children moving away. It's almost as if the town people know is disappearing.
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