Iizuka grew up in Japan, Indonesia, the Netherlands and Washington, D.C. Iizuka attended the National Cathedral School, has her bachelor's degree in classical literature from Yale University in 1987 and spent one year at Yale Law School before eventually receiving her MFA in playwriting from University of California, San Diego in 1992.
'[4] As part of the Big Ten initiative, universities are performing Good Kids to tackle the issue of sexual assault on campus.
'[4] Through the process of creating Good Kids, Izuka collaborated with college students and solicited their input toward the issue of sexual assault and how campuses should prevent and respond to this crime.
[3] Evident in her adaptation of Hamlet Hamlet: Blood on the Brain (2006), Johns Hopkins University Press describes her work as reinforcing 'a sense that the play's archetypal quality could be adapted to fit a society lacking resonance with either ancient Scandinavia or Elizabethan London….non-academic spectators could accept that classics illuminate modern society.'
[6] Set in Oakland in the 1980s, the play is about a young man who gets out of prison to find his father murdered and his uncle in charge of his mother's house.
Through the History of Oakland, California, the play explores the theme of anger and violence in contemporary time, drawing strong parallels to Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Iizuka collapses classical literature and contemporary everyday life by making Minneapolis street kids the main characters of the play instead of mythical gods.
[3] The drug dealers, prostitutes, and homeless tell their stories, some real and some complete lies, which together create some sort of truth about the desolate, urban landscape that they find refuge in.
Darius Wheeler and his assistant John Bell come across revelations that conflict with their previous assumptions throughout the play and up to the very end where 'not even the context of the plot is what it seems to be.'