“Writing a trauma play makes me want to dry heave:” Sanaz Toossi on Wish You Were Here
Not all writers are as expressive in interviews as they are after many drafts of writing, but Sanaz Toossi gives a great interview: She’s funny and pointed, passionate and curious, gifted at throwing out punchlines while breaking your heart—or at least breaking open something vulnerable and true about her writing and her characters. Here are some excerpts from a few interviews she’s given on Wish You Were Here since its premiere at Playwrights Horizons in 2022.
“Someone said to me once, when they were talking about [Wish You Were Here], they were like, ‘The way these women talk, you’re making a point, right? That Muslim women, Middle Eastern women, speak this way?’ Is it making a point when you’re just representing your own life? I don’t know. I just feel like that’s only something that would be tagged on a playwright of color, like, ‘Oh, you’re making a point talking about the very basic aspects of your life.’ People are more comfortable seeing, in a Middle Eastern play, a sexual assault onstage than a woman having her own period.” —Sanaz Toossi in conversation with Diep Tran in American Theatre
“I feel like your relationships with other women are the most profound and the most devastating of your life.”—Sanaz Toossi and Alexis Soloski in The New York Times
“Writing a trauma play makes me want to dry heave. I just think it’s so flattening. It doesn’t help people see us as three-dimensional. I just can’t do it. And I don’t think it’s truthful. I don’t think that’s how life works.”—Sanaz Toossi in conversation with Alexis Soloski in The New York Times
“I’m not a political writer. I’m not a public intellectual. I am, at my core, someone who loves a cheap laugh. I would fling myself off this booth to make you laugh. Politics come into the room, and you’re still trying to make your best friend laugh, or you’re still annoyed that you perioded on the couch — it’s all happening at once. Do people think that Middle Eastern women are huddled under a chador, like, bemoaning our oppressions? Pain looks different than how we think it looks and also joy is always there. Kindness is always there. There’s so much laughter through it.” .”—Sanaz Toossi and Alexis Soloski in The New York Times
“I understand, in my bones, how cruel people can be when they’re trying to be kind to each other. I really love and feel at home in that. I know how to write that scene. I think I’m an expert in homesickness. Detached homesickness — for somewhere you didn’t grow up. I understand friendship deeply. And I understand absences. Really I do. And I’m an expert in riding the hyphen. The gap. The in-between. Feeling like half. I think all of these are just other words for homesickness.” —Sanaz Toossi in conversation with Lizzie Stern
“Humor especially feels so truthful for me. It’s unavoidable. Especially with the Middle East. I feel like it’s a quiet rebellion to have our plays be funny. And when you feel a deep quest for a truth in the play. I love plays that think through a question. I don’t necessarily think my plays do that, but I really treasure that. I love anything that’s a little bit ugly. I am so grateful for plays that you watch and you look over at the playwright and they look embarrassed because they’ve told on themselves. They said something they weren’t supposed to say. I admire that.” —Sanaz Toossi in conversation with Lizzie Stern
“I tell immigrant stories, but I don’t tell them in the United States. How can we tell immigrant stories from the site of migration? I think for Iranians, this question of staying or leaving is huge, and it has affected every family so deeply. I think I always just wanted—needed—people to know the Iran that I know. The Iran that’s never ever portrayed in media or seen in the news.” —Sanaz Toossi in conversation with Diep Tran in American Theatre
“Being Iranian in this country is huge. There’s a lot of pain in having left, and there’s a lot of pain in being an outsider. And then there was joy, there was pride, and there was creation and a new identity. I haven’t really integrated all of those. I just want to braid that together for myself before I vomit it onto a page; I don’t have the language for it.” —Sanaz Toossi in conversation with Diep Tran in American Theatre
Sanaz in conversation with Playwrights Horizons Literary Director Lizzie Stern
This entire conversation is worth a read—the two are great friends, and Lizzie brings both a personal and artistic set of insights to Sanaz’s work, which you’ll see in these excerpts.
Lizzie began by reading an excerpt from a 2016 interview with psychologist Pauline Boss, on Krista Tippett’s podcast “On Being.”
Lizzie Stern (quoting Boss): “Homesickness was an essential part of my family’s culture… I think it may be true for all immigrant families, but it certainly was for mine. And it was even in the village because there were many immigrant families there. So it became a sort of pathos that would be in the family when we weren’t even aware of it, except that I could see the sadness periodically, like when my father would get a letter from Switzerland, or worse yet, a letter with a black rim around it, which meant announcement of death in the family. So I was always aware that there was another family somewhere and that there was some homesickness. Except, where was home? I figured that home was in Wisconsin where we lived. Yet I knew he had this other family across the Atlantic that he pined for. My maternal grandmother was the same. Of course, she refused to learn English. She said she lost her mountains, she lost her mother, she lost her friends, and she wasn’t going to lose her language.”
Sanaz Toossi: That is crazy beautiful.
LS: There’s a way in which, with this type of loss, and with any traumatic thing, people turn it in toward themselves and blame themselves. It’s especially true with ambiguous loss because you can’t point to a concrete fixed point in the swirling chaos of the lack of justice in the world, which feels so much like the moment we’re going through. But, really? This loss feels, to me, a part of your play. (Oh my God, it makes me want to cry.)
ST: (Me too, I’m on the verge of tears.) I’ve been looking for that term for a really long time because I think it defines all of my work. Homesickness. It’s hard to describe it when it was just the way I grew up. You know, we were the only ones here in our family. I’ve always been balancing the privilege in being an American. There were opportunities that were available to me that were maybe not available to my family members and I was always told how lucky I was. But I always felt like when we went back to Iran — oh. They were the lucky ones. We grew up naturally with a separation. All of us. We know what family separation means from the day we are born. And Iranians are so resilient. Our culture lifts up celebration and joy, and our parties are obnoxiously beautiful and egregious. We are a people who know how to celebrate. But even in our celebration, in our extravagant weddings, I am always so cognizant of what it means to celebrate when not everyone is there. I’ve never had a second where I didn’t know that. Everything I write has to do with that kind of ambiguous loss. In [my play] English, it’s about language and how hard it is to leave, and what it means to let that part of yourself go. Wish You Were Here is about friendship and what happens when people you love leave, and what that means about your connection to where you’re from. The loss of a friend can feel like the death of a friend… I always wonder if I will ever stop writing about this. I don’t know.