English / Wish You Were Here: Two Plays

Sanaz Toossi

Book cover for English / Wish You Were Here: Two Plays
Book cover for English / Wish You Were Here: Two Plays

English / Wish You Were Here: Two Plays

English / Wish You Were Here: Two Plays

Sanaz Toossi

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Description

Winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Drama: English

Obie Award for Best New American Play: English

Two breakout plays by an Iranian-American playwright that examine the human costs of migration, both for those who leave their home country and for those who stay.

Sanaz Toossi's English is a comic and empathetic play about a group of Iranian students taking an English language class in the hopes of passing the challenging TOEFL exam. Navigating word games and listening exercises, the students make every effort to become fluent enough to migrate abroad in order to pursue their disparate goals--one hopes to reunite with her Canadian son, another wishes to pursue medical school in Australia. All feel a tension between their Iranian homeland and their hoped-for future. In Wish You Were Here, the focus shifts to a close-knit group of women who initially decide to remain in Iran following the 1979 Islamic Revolution. However, priorities shift as their fluctuating friendships begin to mirror the quickly changing political realities of the country. Taken together, these two plays provide a deeply humanizing portrait of the complex effects of diaspora both within and outside of Iran.

About the Author

Sanaz Toossi is an Iranian-American playwright from Orange County, California. Her plays include the critically acclaimed, award-winning English (co-production Atlantic Theater Company/Roundabout Theatre Company) and Wish You Were Here (Playwrights Horizons; Williamstown/Audible, released 2020). She is currently under commission at Atlantic Theater Company (Launch commission; Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation grant), Roundabout Theatre Company, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Manhattan Theatre Club, South Coast Repertory, and Oregon Shakespeare Festival (American Revolutions Cycle). Sanaz was the 2019 P73 Playwriting Fellow, a recipient of the 2020 Steinberg Playwright Award, the 2022 recipient of The Horton Foote Award and Hull-Warriner Prize, and most recently, the 2023 recipient of the Best New American Play Obie Award. MFA: NYU Tisch.

Critical Reviews

"Both English and Wish You Were Here are gentle character studies, where an accretion of tiny details adds up to something deeply emotional."--Jeff Lunden, NPR

"An absorbing seriocomedy, English is one of those invigoratingly funny and perceptively drawn plays that satisfy a curiosity you didn't know you harbored...An elegantly crafted play about the desire to open oneself up to new worlds through new words.--Peter Marks, Washington Post

"English is both a buoyant comedy of communication and a subtle but probing exploration of what it means to speak out loud and feel understood...A stunning meditation on what makes us human."--Naveen Kumar, New York Theatre Guide

"In a scene for almost every year from 1978 to 1991, a period encompassing the Islamic Revolution, the Iran-Iraq War, and the country's steps toward economic stability, Toossi chooses to focus on the women and how their relationships to one another change with marriages, deaths, and sudden departures."--Maya Phillips, New York Times

Publishing Information

Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
Pub date: 2024-05-28
Length: 240 pages

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