Refugee goes on an ‘Odyssey’ in Transy Theatre’s ‘Anon(ymous)’

For a college junior, Aaron Botts has a pretty good handle on Homer’s “The Odyssey.”

“My mom’s an English teacher, so it’s something she’s always told me about and I’ve read,’” Botts says. “I’ve watched ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?,’ the classic 1960s film version of Odysseus, so it’s something I’m well-versed on.”

Now, Botts finds himself playing an Odysseus-type of character in Transylvania University Theatre’s production of “Anon(ymous),” a variation on “The Odyssey” theme through the refracted view of Naomi Iizuka, a playwright that is becoming familiar at the school. Iizuka’s “Aloha, Say the Pretty Girls” was produced at Transy in 2011, and then Iizuka contributed a monologue to associate professor of theater Michael Bigelow Dixon’s “Evil Genius: Monsters on Stage,” which was a stage production last year.

Kentucky theater fans probably know Iizuka for numerous productions at Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival of New American Plays including “Aloha” (1999), “Polaroid Stories” (1997) and “War of the Worlds” (2000).

“She mixes contemporary reality with mythical stories,” says Dixon, who is directing “Anon(ymous)” and worked with Iizuka on several of her Actors Theatre shows when he was dramaturg there. “Like she did street kids ... with Greek myth in ‘Polaroid Stories,’ here she’s doing the difficulties of being a refugee in Homer’s ‘Odyssey.’

“So you get the hardships of life on the road as a refugee — not having a home, being displaced and searching — with the wildly imaginative interactions with, instead of a cyclops, we have a one-eyed butcher; we have a goddess like Athena in the play, who’s looking out for him, as Athena looked out for Odysseus; we have sirens who are there each day in the run-down bar, but instead of being sirens, they’re barflies. They’re women who are using a song to lure him in, and in the case of this story, the song is ‘Margaritaville.’

“So it’s this unpredictable, unexpected mix of the mythic and the real that makes her work so inventive and imaginative.”

The point Dixon and Botts hope people will take from the show is the real plight of refugees, who often don’t get a sympathetic ear in public discourse.

“He’s displaced as a result of war,” Botts says of his character, Anon. “Especially with what’s going on in the world right now, the message is really powerful, and it makes us question what the traditional notion of a refugee is. It’s somebody being displaced because of circumstances they can’t control.

Botts points to a scene where the daughter of a senator tells Anon, “‘My father thinks illegal aliens come to this country not knowing our language and our customs, and whenever I think of illegal aliens, I think of those little green men that come from space.’ It’s a not-so-subtle commentary on what we picture illegal immigrants to be. But they’re not that at all. They’re human and that story of ‘Anon(ymous)’ is ultimately, ‘What makes somebody human?’”

Another hallmark of Iizuka’s work is eye-popping visuals, which Dixon says the Transy scenic department has achieved with a tri-level stage.

It is a satifying theatrical experience and take on a well-known classic for Botts, who says, “It’s really powerful way to capture the feeling of the journey Anon goes on.”

This story was originally published November 3, 2016 at 1:07 PM with the headline "Refugee goes on an ‘Odyssey’ in Transy Theatre’s ‘Anon(ymous)’."