Home. The Wiz, like Baum’s classic original that inspired it, asks us to consider the concept of home: to challenge it, to keep company with it, and to allow it room for a life of its own. It is a theme hardly unique to this story, though. Indeed, one of America’s most prominent symbols offers a promise of home. Here—in the country where a mighty Lady lifts her lamp for the huddled masses who come tempest-tost to her—home is a place where everyone can have a dream, and live it. This we know as The American Dream. In this sense, America positions herself as that place “Over the Rainbow,” where “the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.” 

But what is it about a home that resonates so deeply? What is it about losing one’s home, or finding oneself out of place in a place called home, that shouts so loudly? In her 1993 Nobel Lecture, Toni Morrison ponders, “What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of a town that cannot bear your company.” Morrison’s inquiry highlights that, despite the professed “world-wide welcome,” both the dream and the home have been inaccessible for many who have come to the land that was allegedly “made for you and me.” 

The Wiz stages the tension between the location of home and the promise of home. Safe (or relatively so) with her aunt and uncle, Dorothy leaves home in order to find it. She finds herself in a new and unfamiliar place, Oz, which allows her to assess her relationship to place, and her belief in herself. The magic ultimately revealed to Dorothy and her companions is that home is not only a somewhere on a map; home is also a somewhere or a something inside. She learns that making yourself home can be the first step towards being at home.