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Sanaz Toossi
Sanaz Toossi
Sanaz Toossi was born in Orange County, California in 1992. Her parents met in the United States after immigrating from Iran (her father shortly before the Islamic Revolution, her mother shortly after it). She grew up speaking Farsi at home with her parents, and English outside of it.
In 2018, Toossi graduated with her masters in playwriting from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Her thesis was English; the play that earned her the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
In a 2019 interview for a playwriting blog Toossi was asked to tell a childhood story that explains who she is as a writer or a person. Her response:
"When I was five, I was completely enchanted with our Lysol air freshener. It was my favorite toy. It was this beautiful teal with little illustrations of gardenias on the can and it smelled so, so good. So one day, I sprayed it directly into my mouth."
In a 2022 profile with American Theatre, she gives some context to this comedic answer:
"I’m funny, and I want my work to be funny, because I want to insist on my own individualism." But, "the truth is that I grew up only seeing certain stories about Middle Easterners and I knew they weren’t true. And it always bothered me, and I couldn’t believe people just took them as fact. It bothered me to my core, and it still bothers me.” She adds, "When you label a Middle Eastern play a drama, I just think that people will go in with an idea of what that play means,” and, “I am really trying to do as much as I can, to lead the conversation in how my work is talked about and how I am talked about.”
"[Homesickness] is the thing that I will always write about because I will never have all the words for it. I think I am on a quest for all of the words."
SANAZ TOOSSI, in an interview with Studio Theatre
Wish You Were Here
Wish You Were Here
Wish You Were Here was scheduled to premiere at Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts in 2020, but COVID-19 moved that debut to Audible in 2021. The play made its New York debut at Playwrights Horizons in 2022 and is now being produced for the first time in Chicago at Remy Bumppo.
While the play may have been prompted and made prescient by world events, the characters of Wish You Were Here are drawn from a personal place. Sanaz Toossi described the play as a love letter to her mother (who's experience is mirrored, more or less, in one of the character's journeys).
From Heidi Schreck (author of The Heidi Chronicles and NYU playwriting instructor to Toossi):
"You said the first glimmer of this play came to you while looking at a photograph of your mom and her girlfriends laughing so hard their faces are a blur. It’s the 1970s in Karaj, Iran, and they don’t yet know how drastically the ground is about to shift underneath their feet, that the solace of home and friendships will be lost to the forces of revolution, repression, and ruthless political decisions made by other people’s governments, including ours. You chart the contours of this devastating loss powerfully by fixing your gaze on quotidian realities of these women’s lives. You give us their childhood games, weddings, dirty jokes, and the insistent realities of their bodies: hairdos, manicures, period blood, profligate leg hair, stinky vaginas, possibly ugly feet. You dive into the wild rivers of desire that so often run between women friends, the tight knots of love and need and jealousy and sometimes cruelty that bind us to one another and so often outlast the bonds we have with spouses."
"When I think about the women who inspired this play, I hear obnoxious, cacophonous laughter. The decrescendo of that laughter is the central loss of this play. But it does not define the play. These women do not need your pity, nor do they want it. But they demand to be seen in their full humanity, as do all refugees, immigrants, and almost-migrants, no matter what part of the world they’re from. People everywhere — beautifully, tragically, obviously — strive for normalcy. I wonder what a humanity play is. What does it mean to show a people in their humanity? Is that setting the bar extremely low? Or extremely high? Is every good play a humanity play? Is every play about humanity?"
SANAZ TOOSSI, in an essay for Playwrights Horizons
Sources
Sources
Abrams, E. (2020). “On a Quest for all the Words”: Sanaz Toossi’s Homesickness. Studio Theatre.
Schrek, H. (2022, April 9). A Letter to Sanaz Toossi. Playwrights Horizons.
Szymkowicz, A. (2019, February 5). I Interview Playwrights Part 1023: Sanaz Toossi. 1100 Playwright Interviews.
Toossi, S. (2022, March 2). Playwright’s Perspective: Sanaz Toossi. Playwright's Horizons.
Tran, D. (2022, May 24). Sanaz Toossi: Can We Talk?. American Theatre
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