Home / Chronology / Strike-Slip / More About Strike-Slip The following articles appeared in Actors Theatre's subscriber newsletter prior to the 2007 Humana Festival STRIKE-SLIP “The issue of earthquake prediction leaves us, not with certainty, necessarily, or understanding, but with a feeling of enlargement, of belonging to the world. There’s a way, after all, in which science fails to apprehend the bigger picture, focusing more on fact than on meaning. That’s a contradictory notion, but then so is the idea of inhabiting a seismic zone, where the simplest bits of business —driving beneath a freeway overpass, putting your children to bed—become extraordinary acts of faith. in such a landscape, the only thing we know for sure is that the earth is moving, which makes us long to feel stability even more. We put our roots down wherever we can secure them. We look for solid ground.” —David Ulin, The Myth of Solid Ground David Ulin’s book The Myth of Solid Ground looks at what he calls the sociology of earthquakes, how living on unstable ground affects the people of Los Angeles. There are a hundred stories about LA, the land of glamour and ethnic diversity, urban sprawl and individual isolation, but one of the most enduring is the contradiction of a city where everything seems possible but nothing is durable. This is the ground, literal and figurative, on which Naomi Iizuka builds Strike-Slip. Her characters’ dreams are simple, familiar and achingly powerful: a Korean convenience store owner who emmigrated to the United states to expand opportunities for his two children; a single mother who dreams of her only son going to college; a local seismologist purchasing a new home with his wife, looking to start a family and hoping for external stability on a foundation we soon learn is shifting. indeed, all these dreams are more vulnerable and complex than they first seem, and when a spontaneous act of violence disrupts these separate equilibriums, the interdependence of these lives begins to become clear, at least to the audience, who are offered a geological-eye view. “How do you live after a catastrophe strikes—whether that’s a natural catastrophe or a personal one?” Iizuka asked as she began writing the play. “How do you fashion a life when your basic understanding of the most essential aspects of your life —who you are, what the world around you is, your family, your home, the people you think you know —in other words, the literal and figurative ground beneath your feet, how do you live your life when those basic elements prove unstable?” Iizuka was originally commissioned by the Mark Taper Forum and funded by the Irvine Foundation to write about the Los Angeles experience. Strike-Slip is a play about a city, and this city is a complex urban mosaic of intersecting racial and cultural points, of connection or dissent. “A city like LA has many centers of the universe, not just one,” Iizuka notes, “and there are these unexpected links among the different centers.” In a city where anyone can be in the car beside you, perhaps it takes a tectonic slap in the face to find these unexpected links. And that’s one of the most evocative truths of LA. Throughout the city’s history, “enormous amounts of money have been spent building on land that could split open. People go about their lives every day on top of an earth that could shatter at any moment,” observes Iizuka. “What kind of frame of mind do you need to live alongside this kind of potential for catastrophe? How do you find some measure of peace in a world that defies predictable equations and certitudes?”” Seismologists don’t predict earthquakes. Even if they could forecast when one would happen, the relationship of one rock fall to the next, the slip and grab of solid and liquid earth, the magnitude and duration of an earthquake are impossible to anticipate. Iizuka turns her characters towards each other, which is where Ulin ultimately leaves his investigation of the mythology of earthquakes: “In a very real way, living with earthquakes cannot help but diminish us, by reducing our lives to a biological afterthought ….Yet if we open our minds, we may, paradoxically, find ourselves enlarged. Human life, after all, is only ephemeral on its own terms, when we consider it independent of everything else. Place it in a context, in conjunction with something larger, and it immediately takes on a more complicated shape. Eternity is right in front of us, if we allow ourselves to see. ” —Mervin P. Antonio NAOMI IIZUKA In the decade since her regional premiere here at Actors Theatre, Iizuka’s plays have been as numerous as they have been diverse. She has written about everything from art forgery to slaughterhouses. She’s adapted The Odyssey and, in collaboration with spoken word poets in Oakland, California she co-wrote an adaptation of Hamlet produced by CalShakes and Intersection for the Arts .Her plays have been produced all over the country and she has won numerous awards, most recently the 2005 Alpert Award. She has also traveled the country non-stop for the last ten years, writing and teaching playwriting. This is Iizuka’s fifth production in the Humana Festival. “I think of Actors Theatre in many ways as an artistic home,” she says. “It’s great to return and see people that I’ve known for many years and meet new people. I feel very lucky to have the opportunity to return.” Iizuka’s first Humana Festival production was of her play Polaroid Stories in 1997. Aloha, Say the Pretty Girls followed in 1999 and a collaboration with Anne Bogart and the SITI Company resulted in War of the Worlds for the 2000 Humana Festival. Iizuka’s most recent Humana Festival production was At the Vanishing Point in 2004, a play crafted from the experiences of Louisvillians living in Butchertown. At the Vanishing Point was several years in the making. The play traced the history of Butchertown through the lives of different men and women who lived there over the past century. Iizuka spent time in Louisville interviewing residents of Butchertown and doing archival research. “It was a remarkable experience delving into the history of the city,”” Iizuka recalls. “What struck me was hearing the stories of men and women who saw Louisville change so much over their lifetimes. it made me look at the city with new eyes. It was like seeing the ghosts of people and places that weren’t there anymore, this whole world underneath the world that exists today.” Strike-Slip investigates a different city. Instead of Louisville, Iizuka is now looking at Los Angeles. “I’minterested in the idea of how a place can be a character,” Iizuka explains. “In Vanishing Point, Butchertown was like another character in the play. It was as if the place was a person you see in the background of the picture and gradually, as the play unfolds, that person moves to the foreground. I think in Strike-Slip, there’s a similar dynamic happening. Los Angeles, the geological and demographic landscape of the city, is like a character in the play. And as the play progresses, that character moves front and center.” As with At The Vanishing Point, Iizuka did a great deal of research for Strike-Slip. she recalls, “two of the people I spoke to early in the writing process were a seismologist and a homicide detective. Hearing them talk gave me the first inklings for a story. That’s where the play began.” Strike-Slip is, in many ways, a continuation of ideas and themes that Iizuka has been grappling with in her other plays. Like At the Vanishing Point, it’s a story about a place and the people in that place. Like 36 Views, it contains a mystery within its center. And like many of her plays, it is an ensemble piece where multiple storylines are set in motion and multiple characters converge in unexpected, sometimes violent ways. “I think it’s also a ghost story, ” Iizuka adds. “All the characters are haunted by something in their past.” in a city that calls itself the city of dreams, there are bound to be many ghosts. Strike-Slip is not just a story about the past, however; it’s a story about the future. It’s a story about a city of immigrants whose population represents the new face of America. It’s a story about trying to build a new life on top of the remnants of an old one. Strike-Slip is a quintessentially American story reconfigured for a new century. —Cara Pacifico