“I know you. And I feel like I knew you then. I love you and everyone who loved you,” writes Sanaz Toossi to her mother, explaining the wellspring for Wish You Were Here. Toossi’s play is grounded in the friendships between five women who are just tipping into their adulthoods together in 1978 Karaj. Of course Iran itself was about to change—the Revolution would come in 1979 and with it a new Islamic Republic and “Islamized” public life; the Iran-Iraq War would come in 1980, bringing air raids and blackouts over the next eight years. Between 1978 and 1985, at least 200,000 Iranians moved to the United States. 75% of Iran’s Jewish population from 1978 left by 1985. The country was remade.
“I love you and everyone who loved you.” Sanaz Toossi knows all these facts. The characters in this play are intimately aware of the changes around them. But Toossi’s project isn’t to bring into focus the pressures that young Iranian women faced coming into an adulthood that was vastly different than the one they had prepared themselves for. What she’s interested in—“you and everyone who loved you”—is more intimate if equally political: the ways geopolitical events slammed into these lives, as captured in the fierce knowing and pettiness and judgment and love that friends can hold of each other.
Wish You Were Here unfolds in fits and restarts, as these characters’ lives do. Friends grow closer, push each other away, rekindle connections, rupture them. As you’ll see, Toossi doesn’t unspool a linear plot so much as offer flashes of the lives of these five friends, threading their way through each other, and inviting the audience to look back at the thirteen years of life and change, dirty jokes and pragmatic calculations.
As a child of a diaspora, Sanaz sees in her mother someone whose heart is lodged in another time and place, someone who is living in more than one culture. In a wide-ranging conversation between Toossi and her good friend Lizzie Stern, the Literary Director of Playwrights Horizons, Stern suggests that a core lens for Toossi’s work is homesickness. Toossi agreed: “I’ve been looking for that term for a long time; I think it defines all of my work. Homesickness…. I am always so cognizant of what it means to celebrate when not everyone is there. Everything I write has to do with that kind of ambiguous loss.”
“I love you and everyone who loved you,” Toossi promises her mother. “I think we would have been friends then, the time at which I’ve set this story. I would have been lucky to be your friend.” In imagining the story of the Iranian diaspora from the perspective of the women who stayed, Toossi imagines lives lived fully at home (“one home,” as a character poignantly promises in the play’s final scene), and invites her audiences to imagine the full lives of people we may only know through a context of geopolitical events or upheaval. She invites us to love them. And everyone who loves them.