English & Wish You Were Here: two plays
15 May 2025Size: 213mm x 136mm£23.99
English & Wish You Were Here: two plays
Paperback £23.99
- Obie Award for Best New American Play - 2023
- Pulitzer Prize for Drama - 2023
In this two-play volume, Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Sanaz Toossi explores the emotional toll of migration, both for those who leave and those who stay.
English premiered off-Broadway at Atlantic Theater Company's Linda Gross Theater in 2022, directed by Knud Adams. It won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Drama and the 2023 Obie Award for Best New American Play.
It's 2008, and four Iranians assemble triweekly in a TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) class in Karaj, Iran. The students are led by Marjan, an anglophile who abolishes Farsi from her classroom. They translate Ricky Martin and endure major preposition confusion; they discover how to be funny in English and ponder what they will lose in the process. As the class slowly devolves into a linguistic mess, some students cling tighter to their mother tongue while others embrace the possibilities of a new language.
Wish You Were Here, set in Iran from 1978 to 1991, is a breathtaking and unabashed comedy-drama exploring the evolving relationships among a group of five women during the escalation, height and aftermath of the Iranian Revolution.
It was premiered at Williamstown Theatre Festival, Massachusetts, in 2020, then off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in 2022.
Taken together, English and Wish You Were Here offer a moving portrait of the complex effects of the Iranian diaspora.
'Both English and Wish You Were Here are gentle character studies, where an accretion of tiny details adds up to something deeply emotional'
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'
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'
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'
New York Times15 May 2025Size: 213mm x 136mm£23.99
