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Chambers offers a critical reading of Naomi Iizuka's script Skin, a haunting reworking of Georg Büchner's Woyzeck. Chambers seeks to identify and map the playwrights' linkage by a common concern for the destructive nature of totalitarian social systems which deny agency through silencing, isolation, and alienation. Iizuka both celebrates and contests Bächner's text, and this ability, which is central to her aesthetic, is a principal force in her endeavor to challenge, excite and nourish her theatre audience.
The theatre artists who are working in the most exciting ways are creating new fusions or hybrids from old material. They sing old songs in their own strange, wild, utterly singular voices. . . . They spin out new yarns with old thread. I can think of few skills more useful in the times in which we live. Myth makes an art of recycling. . . . reminds us of a simple fact. There were those who came before. They are our kin. We are more like them than not.
-Naomi Iizuka, "What Myths May Come" (19, 79)
In a recent profile in America Theatre, contemporary American playwright Naomi Iizuka remarks, "I like theatre that startles me, and that makes me reappraise my relationship with the real. I think that is probably more easily accessed by going towards myth, or going towards something that's not, strictly speaking, realistic." Iizuka goes on to claim that her approach to playwriting is informed, at least to a certain extent, by the "cultural marginalization" of live theatre in the United States; and that she, along with a number of other emerging theatre artists, view this position as "liberating." Freed from the constraints of a theatre that is "all about careerism and money," Iizuka holds that this new generation of young, experimental theatre artists committed to risk-taking are finding an audience largely comprised of "young people" who are hungry for "a theatre that speaks to them" (Berson, "Naomi Iizuka" 56-57). Iizuka's penchant for a theatre that "startles," her desire to "reappraise [her] relationship with the real," by way of "myth" or "something . . . not . . . realistic," as well as her commitment to create theatre pieces that "speak" to an audience of "young people," have been significant forces...