In Wish You Were Here, Sanaz Toossi focuses on the lives of her characters within the living rooms of Karaj, Iran from 1978-1991. But as the actors and production team were building up our understanding of the world outside and across Iran, dramaturg Adrien-Alice Hansel brought a range of resources to support the work in the room. (Most of which are available at the DC Public Library.) Throughout, links are to interviews with the writers / creators of the resources we have offered here. Adrien-Alice offers some context on what the team found useful about each resource.
Our take from the rehearsal hall: Based on Esfandiari’s interviews with Iranian women in the wake of the Iran-Iraq war, from 1992-1994. We pulled first-person stories and analysis from women who lived in Iran through the 1979 Revolution and into the 1990s.
Iranian women tell in their own words what the revolution attempted and how they responded. Reconstructed Lives presents Iranian women telling in their own words what the revolution attempted and how they responded. Through a series of interviews with professional and working women in Iran—doctors, lawyers, writers, professors, secretaries, businesswomen—Haleh Esfandiari gathers dramatic accounts of what has happened to their lives as women in an Islamic society. —from the publisher
Take from the rehearsal hall: There are many amazing first-person novels set during the Iranian Revolution (we aren’t even getting into Marjan Kamali’s work in this list!). But Bazyar’s work is particularly interesting because of the ways it traces generations of a family dedicated to creating an Iran they can believe in. It gets to something that Sanaz’s play is after as well—how much you can love a home that demands too much of you; the dislocation of life away from the culture that made your parents. This translation is remarkable.
Set across four decades, The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran is about revolution, oppression, resistance and freedom, charting one family’s flight from and return to Iran. In Iran 1979, Behzad is devoted to the communist cause, smuggling flyers and fighting alongside comrades. In West Germany 1989, Nahid despairs at the way words lose their beauty when translated from Farsi to German. In 1999, Laleh is uncomfortable in her budding body on a brief trip back to Tehran, where the days are raucous and dusty and the nights are quiet. In 2009, Mo watches a new revolution unfold in his parents’ homeland from his laptop screen.
Take from the rehearsal hall: So coming clean, most of us had already read Persepolis by the time we started rehearsal; it’s a classic. But it’s also candid and accessible, and offers a rare young person’s take on the upheaval of the cultural changes of the Iranian Revolution alongside the upheavals of any coming-of-age story.
Persepolis is the story of Satrapi's unforgettable childhood and coming of age within a large and loving family in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution; of the contradictions between private life and public life in a country plagued by political upheaval; of her high school years in Vienna facing the trials of adolescence far from her family; of her homecoming--both sweet and terrible; and, finally, of her self-imposed exile from her beloved homeland.
Take from the rehearsal hall: Moosavi’s look at the way that the Iran-Iraq War played out in both Arab and Persian literature from 1980 to 2025 gave the rehearsal hall a sense of the human size of the war—along with the intensity of the propaganda around the conflict from both the Iranian and Iraqi regimes.
Dust That Never Settles considers how Iraqi and Iranian writers have wrestled with representing the Iran-Iraq War and its legacy, from wartime to the present. Lasting from September 1980 to August 1988, the Iran-Iraq War was the longest conventional war fought between two states in the twentieth century. It marked a period that began just after a revolutionary government in Iran became an Islamic Republic and Saddam Hussein consolidated power in Iraq. It ended with both wartime governments still in power, borders unchanged, yet hundreds of thousands of people dead. Neither side emerged as a clear victor, but both sides would eventually claim victory in some form. —from the publisher
Take from the rehearsal hall: Ebadi’s work is later than the period in our play, but it gives a sense of what life under surveillance from the Morality Police is like, and how different kinds of people respond to the intensity of consistent scrutiny. She also writes about the pain of living in exile from Iran.
For years the Islamic Republic tried to intimidate Shirin Ebadi, but after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad rose to power in 2005, the persecution intensified. The government wiretapped Ebadi’s phones, bugged her law firm, sent spies to follow her, harassed her colleagues, detained her daughter, and arrested her sister on trumped-up charges. It shut down her lectures, fired up mobs to attack her home, and nailed a death threat to her front door. But nothing could keep Ebadi from speaking out and standing up for human dignity. In this searing memoir, the first Muslim woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize tells her story of courage and defiance in the face of an Iranian government out to destroy her, her family, and her mission: to bring justice to the people and the country she loves. —from the publisher
Take from the rehearsal hall: This is a slow-burn historical look at the year and a half of the Iranian Revolution, largely through the eyes of Americans and Iranians who witnessed it. It’s written by a reporter, and Scott Anderson is remarkably well-sourced and readable. (The link above is to an interview with Anderson at the Toronto Public Library.)
Based on voluminous research and dozens of interviews, Scott Anderson weaves the spellbinding story of a dictator oblivious to the disdain of his subjects and a superpower blundering into disaster. The Iranian Revolution, Anderson convincingly argues, was as world-shattering an event as the French and Russian Revolutions. Around the globe, including in the United States, the hatred of economically marginalized, religiously fervent masses for a wealthy secular elite has led to violence and upheaval—and Iran was the template. King of Kings is a bravura work of history, and a warning.
Take from the rehearsal hall: This is a slow-burn historical look at the year and a half of the Iranian Revolution, largely through the eyes of Americans and Iranians who witnessed it. It’s written by a reporter, and Scott Anderson is remarkably well-sourced and readable. (The link above is to an interview with Anderson at the Toronto Public Library.)
November 4, 1979, Iranian student activists stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran, taking 62 Americans hostage. A 48-hour sit-in to protest imperialism turned into an international crisis and 24/7 media event that would last 444 days. With never-before-seen archival footage and revelatory new interviews with the American hostages and Iranian hostage-takers alike, the HBO Max series is a gripping chronicle of one of the most dramatic international deadlocks in American history, a deep dive into the geo-political history that led to the crisis, and an exploration of the political fallout that reverberates today.