ANON(YMOUS) Stirs the Melting Pot in ISU's CPA

Naomi Iizuka's writing is beautiful. As she uses poetic language and striking images to convey big ideas, she also captures something very human in her work. That's clear in Anon(ymous), now playing in Illinois State University's Center for the Performing Arts in a production directed by MFA directorial candidate Richard Corley.

The human element is provided not only by Iizuka's main character, the boy called Anonymous, here portrayed with heart and weary vulnerability by Owais Ahmed, but in the other voices and faces who step forward to remind us that America's melting pot is composed of individuals, of people who remember beautiful and wonderful things about their homelands, people who lose their souls if they melt into nameless, faceless, interchangeable parts of the American landscape.

The words and the images of this ISU production underline that message, that it's just fine to celebrate what makes you different as well as what makes you the same, and Corley's actors, especially Ahmed as Anon, and Caitlin Boho, Gabriela Fernandez, Martin Hanna, Kent Nusbaum, Omar Shammaa and Taylor Wisham in the ensemble, embrace the material with warmth and commitment to individual characters.

The CPA is a large space for a show like this, but John Stark's set design, with towering panels of sheet metal, provides good atmosphere and tension. There are some striking images here, especially when staging, performances, and scenic and lighting effects all come together, as in the sweatshop scenes with the women in the background moving like automatons, clothing strung over their heads, and when Anon and his friend Pascal take a train ride into the night. The way Corley has staged the end, when Anon finds his version of home, also creates a nice moment.

Mark Spain's costumes and some complicated pieces, like a giant metal bird and a huge butterfly, contribute to the experience, as does Mark Maruschak's atmospheric lighting design.

If I have a complaint, it's that the pace was a bit sluggish on opening night. I clocked Anon(ymous) at 1:15 when I saw it last; this time it was 1:40. Faster playing time and cue pick-ups would've kept the drama clicking along and better involved us in Anon's odyssey across America.

ANON(YMOUS)
By Naomi Iizuka

Illinois State University
Center for the Performing Arts

Director: Richard Corley
Scenic Designer: John C. Stark
Costume Designer: Mark Spain
Hair and Makeup Designer: Kristen Kucek
Lighting Designer: Mark Maruschak
Voice and Dialect Directors: Connie de Veer and Heidi Harris
Fight Director: Paul Dennhardt
Stage Manager: Nicole Pressner

Cast: Owais Ahmed, Caitlin Boho, Chloe Ewer, Gabriela Fernandez, Martin Hanna, Anthony Leyva, Kent Nusbaum, Omar Shammaa, Hisako Sugeta, Jaimie Taylor, Erica Trumpet, Taylor Wisham.

Remaining Performances: October 3, 4, 5 and 6 at at 7:30 pm

Running time: 1:40, played without intermission

For ticket information, click here.

Blast From the Past: My Review of Anon(ymous) at U of I in 2008

Naomi Iizuka

Naomi Iizuka's "Anon(ymous)," a riff on the Odyssey in a contemporary, global setting, will be the first show in the new fall season from Illinois State University's Department of Theatre and Dance. The show opens September 29, with performances running through October 6 in the CPA. It's directed by MFA director Richard Corley, and stars Owais Ahmed as Anon, the boy from nowhere who finds himself adrift in an unfriendly world.

I've seen "Anon(ymous)" before, and, although I remembered that I liked it a lot when it played the black box Studio Theatre at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Illinois, I wasn't all that clear on why. So, as we prepare for a new "Anon(ymous)," I thought it might be instructive to pull the review I wrote for that first "Anon(ymous)" out of the archives and run it again. It originally ran in the Champaign News-Gazette in November, 2008. I don't know what the headline was (now you know that reviewers don't write their own headlines) so I'm running it without one.

And here goes...

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Guest director Alec Wild seems to go for peripatetic material. Two years ago, he directed “Gint” for the University of Illinois Department of Theatre, a modern retelling of Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt,” wherein our hero travels all over the world to find himself.

This year, Wild has taken the reigns of Naomi Iizuka’s “Anon(ymous),” a modern retelling of Homer’s “Odyssey,” wherein our hero travels all over the United States to find himself.

You can see the original “Odyssey” in this “Anon(ymous)” – most obviously in the form of the Cyclops (here a one-eyed butcher named Zyclo) and the enchantress (Circe to Homer, but a barfly named Serza to Iizuka) – but the other characters are there, too, if you know your “Odyssey.”

There are differences, most especially the concept of home. Through all of his adventures, Odysseus is trying to find his way back to Ithaca, while the young hero of “Anon(ymous)” has no home left to find. His homeland was destroyed in a war, and there’s nothing left there to go back to, he tells us. All he’s really looking for is his mother, from whom he was separated when their leaky fishing boat overturned. That sends him through layers of American life, as he meets up with people with different faces, different accents and different rungs on the ladder of success.

Wild has cast his story with a multicultural cast, which suits the material nicely. As he did in “Gint,” Wild employs story theater and group interp techniques, so that his actors use voice, movement, a long expanse of cloth and a few chairs to create a battlefield and then a sweatshop, moving smoothly from one to the other.

That works especially well with the gripping opening, the storm-tossed seas, and a scene where Anonymous and his companion travel by truck with a monster. The entire ensemble is very good, with excellent group work as well as individual characterizations.

Some of the more vivid characters include Christa Sablic’s caged bird, Jake Szczepaniak’s cleaver-wielding Zyclo, Nasreen, a feisty young woman played by Jenna Jiminez, Dominique Worsley’s blind restaurant owner, Jonathan Butler-Deplessis’s take on best pal Pascal, a string of villains portrayed by Jeremiah Lowry, Kathryn Muck’s seductive Serza, and Jennifer Nelson’s spoiled beach princess, Calista.

At the center of the piece, Jennifer Bradford exudes warmth and strength as Penny, the mother our hero keeps looking for, while Volen Iliev is appealing and compelling as Nobody/Monkey/Anonymous himself.

If there’s a weakness here, it’s that the ending comes a little quickly. After all of his trials and tribulations, Anonymous finds his version of home too fast, it seems.

If you go:

What: “Anon(ymous),” by Naomi Iizuka

Where: Studio Theatre, Krannert Center for the Performing Arts

Creative Team: Director: Alec Wild. Scenic Designer: Stephanie Charaska. Costume Designer: Amy Bartelt. Lighting designer: Kantrina Linam. Sound designer: Doug Cross.

Cast: Jennifer Bradford, Volen Iliev, Jeremiah Lowry, Jake Szczepaniak, Christa Sablic, Jennifer Nelson, Paige Collins, Dominiqie Worsley, Jenna Jimenez, Kathryn Muck, Jonathan Butler-Duplessis.

Running time: 1:15, played without intermission

Remaining Performances: Wednesday through Saturday, November 5-8, at 7:30 p.m., Sunday, November 9, at 3 p.m..

Box office: 333-6280, www.KrannertCenter.com/tickets/

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Well, if I had it to do over again, I would probably not use "peripatetic" in the first sentence. And I would try not to end it so quickly, such that my own writing has the same fault I just assigned to the script of "Anon(ymous)."

But it's still interesting to revisit my reaction to that version of the show as I anticipate seeing the next one. And I hope you've enjoyed this little trip in the Wayback Machine. Because many of my reviews were not published online, this is the only way to see them again other than visiting the News-Gazette newspaper library or searching through archives. I think this is probably a bit easier.

A Mix of Old and (Sort of) New in ISU's 2012-13 Season

Illinois State University's School of Theatre has announced the line-up for its 2012-13 season, with lots of classics, a few newer pieces, and a mix of styles and moods. Dates and details (like who's directing what) will be filled in later, but for now, this is what ISU actors and audiences have to look forward to in the next school year.

Naomi Iizuka

This fall, they'll start with the newest play, Naomi Iizuka's "Anon(ymous)" from 2006, in the Center for the Performing Arts. "Anon(ymous)" is a poetic, surreal exploration of Homer's "Odyssey" played across the scarred landscape of immigration in America. Iizuka's version of Odysseus is a rootless wanderer, a boy named Anon, who comes from somewhere "far away from here," searching for his mother, the Penelope of the story, who toils at a sweatshop somewhere in the US, fending off the advances of her creepy boss. Along his journey, Anon runs into characters who roughly correspond to the ones in the Odyssey, so, instead of a Cyclops, he has to fight to escape from a one-eyed psychopathic butcher wielding a big cleaver, and the nymph Calysto is now a snotty rich girl who tries to entice him with Skittles and Kit Kats. So far away from where he started, our immigrant Anon dreams of finding his mother and finally ending up someplace that feels like home.

After that, it's Rebecca Gilman's 1998 play, "The Glory of Living," which deals with the dark underbelly and the damaged, criminal children of America's Deep South. In the play, Lisa, the teenage daughter of a "drunk whore," is picked up and pulled along into a life of abuse and murder by Clint, her rapist boyfriend. She finally has a twinge of conscience -- maybe -- and leaves tips for the police about all what she and Clint have done, with the play then moving to how the criminal court system deals with each of them. The issues here are crime, punishment, morality, emotional instability, and what happens to unformed, abandoned children who never grow up, with plenty of blame to chew on. "The Glory of Living," set to play in Centennial West 207, received the ATCA Osborn Award for the Best New Play of 1998, and was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Then it will be Bertold Brecht's "Mother Courage and Her Children," widely considered to be among the best anti-war plays ever written, in Westhoff Theatre. Brecht wrote the play in Germany in 1939, as Hitler and the Nazi movement were creating a climate of violence and privation not unlike the wartime setting in the play. Mother Courage is a tough "canteen woman," a kind of peddlar who pulls a cart, trading and selling goods to soldiers. She continually tries and continually fails to balance turning a profit with keeping her children safe amidst the strife of war.

"The Cherry Orchard," Chekhov's bittersweet look at the fading fortunes of the aristocracy and the rise of a middle class composed of former serfs in turn-of-the-20th-century Russia, will follow in CW 207. As the play opens, Madame Ranevskaya returns to the country estate she can no longer afford, not understanding that her home, her orchards, and the entire way of life she's used to, must make way in changing times. Chekhov supposedly thought "The Cherry Orchard" was a comedy, but there is a lot of loss and sadness to deal with in this quiet, pensive play about the futility of standing still when the world keeps moving.

Michael Frayn's "Noises Off" is a completely different sort of piece, a backstage (and front-stage) farce about a hapless road company of washed-up or never-were players just trying to get the doors slammed and the sardines brought on and off at the right moments. "Noise Off" happens to be absolutely hilarious in the right hands (I've seen it sublime and I've seen it wretched, depending on the production) and it also give its scenic designer the chance to do a full, two-story house (or "posset mill") set that spins around at intermission. ISU has slated this one for the CPA, which is a step in the right direction.

Elmer Rice

In spring, ISU's sights will turn to "The Adding Machine." There is a recent musical version, but I'm assuming they'll be doing the 1923 play by Elmer Rice of "Street Scene" fame. Both versions deal with the same basic idea, about a man named Zero who is just a cog in a big company, an accountant, until he is replaced by an adding machine. This drama, headed for the CPA, is about man vs. machine, the worker vs. the nameless, faceless corporation, and the loss of humanity in an industrial vacuum.

That will be followed by "J.B.," the 1958 Archibald MacLeish drama that tells the story of Job, the man in the Bible visited upon by so many troubles. MacLeish put his play in free verse and set it in a circus tent, with a balloon seller and a popcorn guy standing in for God and Satan. And it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1959. "J.B." will pitch its tent inside Westhoff Theatre.

"Tales of the Lost Formicans," another surreal piece, comes next, with performances set for CW 207. Oddly enough, it was last performed at ISU in their 1994-95 season, along with "Noises Off" and one year after "The Adding Machine." Some plays never go out of style, I guess. In any event, Constance Congdon's "Tales of the Lost Formicans" was a 1989 Humana Festival play, with a clever, fresh and decidedly odd take on how aliens might try to fit together the pieces of 20th century life by looking at one "normal" family dealing with Alzheimers, a messy marital break, and a foul-mouthed, unhappy teenager. Congdon's voice is unlike anybody else's, and it's good to see one of her plays back in rotation.

That leaves just Rodgers' and Hammerstein's "Oklahoma!" and Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream" to round out the year for ISU Theatre. "Oklahoma!" will go up in the CPA, naturally, with "Midsummer" in Westhoff, finishing up in time for ISU personnel to concentrate on the 2013 Illinois Shakespeare Festival.

ISU School of Theatre has listed its new season here, with promises of more details to come later. So far, it's looking like a pretty cool and quite eclectic season.