May 12, 2023
Sanaz Toossi has received the Pulitzer Price by far, the most prestigious writing award available in the United States for her play “English,” the first play she has ever written.
She received the award for drama. The prize is given annu- ally in seven categories of literature, 15 categories of journalism and one in music. It was organized more than a century ago by Joseph Pulitzer, a major publisher of daily newspapers across the United States. They are awarded by Columbia University and carry a cash prize of $15,000.
Pulitzers are widely recognized as the most prestigious awards in their field within the United States.
“‘English’ was my first production ever,” said the 30-year-old Toossi, who was born and reared in Orange County, California, the child of Iranian immigrant parents.
When audiences walked into the theater in February of last year in New York for its first production, she was nervous. “Oh, my God, the terror of an audience
coming was, like, definitely something I wish I had been prepared for but also, something I think you can only learn by having an audience coming!”
Toossi needn’t have worried “English” not only won rave reviews from local critics, but received the Lucille Lortel award for outstanding new off-Broadway play. Now her second play, “Wish You Were Here,” has opened. In both works, she said, “I
wanted to break those expectations about what a play set in the Middle East has to be aesthetically, and also tonally. There are no moments of violence.” Toossi traveled to Iran many
times when she was young. “English” began as her graduate school thesis at New York University. The Trump travel ban, which cut off Iranian citizens from visiting the US, had just been implemented, and Toossi says she was “quietly furious.”
Her advisor, playwright Lucas Hnath, told her “to just write the thing that you need to write.
Write the thing that you love. Don’t write what you think is going to be smart or would be cool. Write from your heart.” And so Toossi did. “I am a proud daughter of immigrants. I grew up with a lot of first-gen kids,” she said. “To feel that disrespect coming toward my parents and Middle Easterners and Muslims in general, I felt a need to write of the pain of being misunderstood.”She decided to set that first play in an English-as-a-Foreign Language class in her mother’s hometown of Karaj, in 2008. The students and teacher are either planning to emigrate or returning from abroad and each one feels caught between two cultures.
Toossi said she wanted to put the audience in the characters’ shoes. “I knew that they would never understand how hard it is to learn a new tongue and feel stupid and
feel, you know, isolated from where you’re from.” She created an interesting conceit for the play: when the characters are speaking Farsi, they talk in fluid unaccented English.
When they’re speaking English, they speak haltingly, with accents. Only at the end of the play does the audience actually hear two characters speak in Farsi. Both “English” and “Wish You Were Here” are gentle character studies, where an accretion of tiny details adds up to something deeply emotional.
“I think she, like Chekhov, is in love with the absurdity of what it means to be alive and what it means to be human,” said Gaye Taylor Upchurch, “Wish You Were Here’s” New York director. “And investigating that and looking at people in these moments that aren’t seemingly big moments in their lives, but that really explode everything about them.” “Wish You Were Here” tracks the up-and-down friend-
ships of five women over the course of 13 years in Karaj, Iran.
It starts in 1978, during the revolution, and continues through the Iran-Iraq War, all the way to 1991 when only one of these women is left in Iran. As these major political and social changes happen in the background, the women celebrate weddings, talk profanely about bodily fluids and sex and laugh a lot.
“So often, I think with Middle Eastern plays we’re tasked to tell these ‘other’ stories,” said Iranian-born actress Marjan Neshat, who has appeared in both plays. “And it’s so refreshing and so profound to get to play these nuanced, multidimensional, funny, radical women.”
Toossi said that those words could describe her own mother, and that “Wish You Were Here” is a love letter to her. She pointed to one character’s monologue:
“She will have a home. A home; one home. I won’t teach her Farsi. She will never have to know what an F1 or IR2 is./She won’t even know the word revo-
lution. Never. Never. She will never know how fast this earth
can spin underneath you.
How one day you can have a home and the next as you are hurtling
through the air you will have to vanquish home the word home the idea of home as anything that has ever existed or will exist again.”
That monologue, she said, “is from a mother describing what she wants for her daughter.
And that is 100 percent my mother.” Since it started in New York, the play has been staged in Boston, Washington, Toronto, Montreal and Berkeley, California, with productions planned in Atlanta, western Massachusetts, Seattle, Chicago and Minneapolis. Toossi is currently on strike with the other members of the Writers Guild of America and spends some of her time on the picket line.