Playwrights Horizons to Present Sanaz Toossi's WISH YOU WERE HERE

Playwrights Horizons will present Sanaz Toossi's Wish You Were Here, directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch, April 13-May 22 (opening May 2) in the Peter Jay Sharp Theater. With humanity and cutting wit, Wish You Were Here chronicles 13 years of everyday life through the Iranian Revolution and Iran-Iraq War, as best friends forever become friends long lost, scattered and searching for home.

Wish You Were Here begins in 1978, as protests are breaking out all across Iran, encroaching on a suburb where girlfriends in a tight-knit circle plan weddings, trade dirty jokes, and try to hold onto a sense of normalcy. But as the revolution escalates, each woman is forced to join the wave of emigration or face an equally uncertain future at home. Written by Toossi as a tribute to her mother's group of friends in Iran, Wish You Were Here is a warm, intricate character study that locates beauty, love, laughter, longing, pain, and loss within the minutiae of friends' hangouts-moments separated from a context of political and cultural upheaval by the porous divide of their homes' walls.

Part of a breakthrough year for Toossi-who made her Off-Broadway debut this month with her play English, co-produced by Atlantic Theater Company and Roundabout Theatre Company-Wish You Were Here has already garnered acclaim as the recipient of an Edgerton Foundation New Play Award and, at The National Theatre Conference, the Barrie and Bernice Stavis Playwright Award. For Toossi, the play rapidly morphed from idea into a fully-realized script, as the characters sprang forth from reflections of the playwright, her mother, their respective circles of friends.

"My friendships are the most mundane part of my life and also the best and most important part of my life," she says, explaining how this work so organically took form. "'Mundane' has become a special word for me when discussing Wish You Were Here. In Middle Eastern plays, there's an expectation you're going to walk into the theater and all the characters are going to be in a crisis. I love those plays too, but for me I've always wanted to write, simply, life. I wanted to honor characters that are full of contradictions, to show the fluidity of life over time, how there's not always logic in our decisions and life and we don't even know ourselves a lot of the time-to give them the real, mundane patterns of life I don't often see them afforded onstage."

Putting a tight focus on small moments, Toossi has structured her play around settings-all living rooms, represented as one single, unchanging space-and occasions that echo one another. Three of the play's nine temporally and tonally distinct sections are set on a different characters' wedding day. Through these overlaps, the changes, absences, and new presences become all the more palpable. Says Gaye Taylor Upchurch, "Sanaz is a master at rigorously observing shifts in friendships over time. And it's a rare opportunity to work on a play with five women that so astutely shines a light on the many facets of female friendship. I want to focus on how to render those nuanced changes that happen slowly over 13 years, to give these portrayals as much detail and vitality as Sanaz has built into the play. We've put together an incredible cast and I'm excited to get them into a room together, because they're fireworks."

The world premiere production features a cast of all Iranian and Iranian-American women actors. Through the play's development process, Toossi says she and the cast have come to understand "how deeply we want to tell the stories of our mothers, how we always have, and what it feels like to tell that story in community." Though the characters begin the play around the age of 20, actors were cast, in accordance with the script, to represent "the women they will become" over a decade, creating a simultaneity between memory and future. The cast includes Nikki Massoud (Off-Broadway: Othello; Regional: Zealot, TV: 'Love Life') as Zari, Marjan Neshat (Playwrights: Selling Kabul, Other Off-Broadway: English, Joan) as Nazanin, Nazanin Nour (Regional: Othello, TV: 'Persia's Got Talent,' 'Madam Secretary') as Rana, Artemis Pebdani (TV: "Scandal," "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia") as Shideh/New Friend, and Roxanna Hope Radja (Torch Song, Frost/Nixon, After the Fall) as Salme. The creative team includes Arnulfo Maldonado (Scenic Design), Sarah Laux (Costume Design), Reza Behjat (Lighting Design), Sinan Refik Zafar & Brian Hickey (Sound Design), Vanessa Coakley (Production Stage Manager), and Jenn Jacobs (Assistant Stage Manager).

Playwrights Horizons Artistic Director Adam Greenfield says, "Over and over again, I'm astonished by this play. As Sanaz tracks the minute dynamics between these five friends - each character finely etched, and totally indelible - she also tracks the seismic recomposition of their entire world. Wish You Were Here is both intimate and epic, both lightning-fast and glacially slow. And it's a piece of writing that genuinely mystifies me, as somehow through its changing landscape the play manages to offer a glimpse of time itself: the part of our trip that we understand the very least."

Playwrights Horizons' Commitment to Health and Safety:

To best protect audiences, artists, and staff members, Playwrights Horizons will now require all audience members to provide proof of a booster shot (via CDC vaccination card, NY State Excelsior Pass Plus, or NYC Covid Safe app), in addition to full vaccination, and to wear face masks at all times while at the theater. N95 or KN95 masks are strongly encouraged (and are required of staff, and of artists when not on stage during a performance). The company has outlined all current updates in their full health and safety policy.

The theater's ventilation system complies with the CDC's standards (MERV-13 filters), high-touch surfaces are being cleaned regularly, and paperless ticketing is offered for all performances.

Playwrights Horizons encourages anyone interested in getting vaccinated to visit this site for guidance.

Performance Schedule and Ticketing

Wish You Were Here runs April 13-May 22 and officially opens on May 2.

Tickets can be purchased at https://my.playwrightshorizons.org/events.

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