Camille Chang
Wish You Were Here, a play by Sanaz Toossi, directed by Sivan Battat at the Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven, CT, October 5—October 28, 2023
One night in October, I walked out of the Yale Repertory Theatre with puffy eyes that hurt to close, a long stream of clear mucus dripping from my nose, and a damp face on which the tears had begun to crust into fine salt. That night, I had watched the Rep’s production of Wish You Were Here by Sanaz Toossi. All these bodily responses were evidence of what had happened to me in that dark theater—I had spent almost the entire play weeping in my seat. It’s one thing when work “moves your soul” or plays tricks on your mind. Wish You Were Here pulled off an even greater feat: moving my body.
Toossi is an NYU graduate with only two published plays, Wish You Were Here and English, the latter of which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. As a playwright, she seems to have appeared out of thin air. She wrote English as part of her M.F.A. thesis from the NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and wrote Wish You Were Here in 2019, the year after her graduation. Both plays have only been produced as live performances in the past two years. They have shown in rapid succession and in great numbers.
When summarizing Wish You Were Here into the short, digestible descriptions necessary for dramaturgical notes and programs, it is easy to characterize its setting through war. The play ostensibly comments on the lives of five friends during the onset of the Iranian Revolution. It then follows these five women over a decade as they adapt to new circumstances in the suburb of Karaj, Iran. As violent revolution continues on in the background, Nazanin, Shideh, Salme, Rana, and Zari perform the roles of friends wrapped around each other in a symbiotic web of womanhood, every one the others. Tethered though they are, they come and go from their hometown for various reasons. Eventually, only one woman is left. The conclusion might be that such is the effect of war: people leave.
Toossi wrote both plays amid the blazing outcry against former President Trump’s Executive Order 13769, which banned travel from seven predominantly-Muslim countries, including Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Both Wish You Were Here and English, from their very inception, deal with distance, travel, and separation. Toossi proposes that the physical presence of people is political—where you live, where you have been, where you go. While this idea is not necessarily new, Toossi's unique approach—overlooked in many reviews and dramaturgical notes of the play—puts her characters under a microscope and picks apart the body as a landscape.
In the finer details, upon a closer and more uncomfortable magnification of what is in front, inside, and below our faces, Wish You Were Here picks apart what it means to have a stinking and breathing body, acted upon and acting with the surrounding world’s political forces.
Shideh, an aspiring doctor characterized in the playbill as “a little uptight,” is the main source of raunch and ruckus in the very first scene. She makes a show of needing the sole fan in the sweltering room, as people are busy with her more reserved friend Salme’s wedding preparations. We discover a few beats later that her love of ventilation stems from her ripe yeast infection, and that, simply in the spirit of good genital hygiene, “a pussy audit” might be in order for Salme and Shideh. The five women are, at most times, incredibly childish. They are aware of their bodies in the way that adolescents can pick out each newly sprouted facial hair, or measure a millimeter increase in breast size. Shideh seems to be especially young, although the friends are all in their early twenties. She admits that “there comes a time in a woman’s life when soap doesn’t cut it”–apparently she has now come to that turning point in her young life–“And I think it was really brave of me to say that just now.” Shideh has all the self-consciousness of a kid entering puberty for the first time, especially in the way she reveals this fact to her also-changing friends.
So much of Wish You Were Here’s opening scenes rely on the irreplaceable sensory experience of another person’s body: the stench of a sweating body, the intimacy of performing a thorough review of a friend's vagina. Although every scene takes place in an interior space—theoretically sheltered from the Revolution unfolding outside—each woman’s body bears the evidence of the political changes caused by the new Islamic laws. In scene six, we find Nazanin and Zari smoking together after returning from a trip outside, clothed in roosari head coverings and long manteaus. Their very bodies are cloaked in the political change from monarchical dynasty to a theocratic government.
The play's blurring of distinction between social and private reminded me of Carol Hanisch's aphoristic but helpful 1969 essay "The Personal is Political," which argues that the private body is always reflective of the political structures that act upon it. Hanisch originally wrote the essay in response to a critique of the Women’s Liberation Movement that stated that women’s discontent as mothers and homemakers were personal issues, not political ones. Feminist meetings were being discredited as places to therapize women who were sad about doing housework. Hanisch countered that advocating for change within womens’ domestic spheres was advocating for political change.
Hanisch regularly attended meetings at the New York office of the Southern Conference Educational Fund, which often entailed sharing personal experiences—what might appear to be a kind of group therapy. Yet, she affirms: “There is only collective action for a collective solution. I went, and I continue to go to these meetings because I have gotten a political understanding which all my reading, all my ‘political discussions,’ all my ‘political action,’ all my four-odd years in the movement never gave me.”
Through Hanisch’s lens, Nazanin, Shideh, Salme, Rana, and Zari sitting together and discussing leg hair is the stable ground on which to raise a structure of action and collective political awareness. On this foundation, political action is also constructed by the mere fact of their display on a stage, built upon the act of saying a raunchy line in the first place. Women’s bodies bear the weight of the political changes during the Iranian Revolution, whether through mandated full body coverings, even while swimming, or in the absence of their bodies from the places they used to occupy—schools, outdoor spaces, and their home countries. While the five women seem to be changed by their political environment, their group meetings remind us of a woman’s agency to speak, to wear head coverings if they so choose, and even to leave, as eventually all but Nazanin do. They are a reminder that some choose to stay.
As the play progresses, the women’s vulgarity succumbs to grief and often silence—holding the space for loss, both of life and of personal freedom. But their personal meetings, and even more so, their candid banter about the workings of their physical bodies, is equally strong as a collective action. The personal is political, and what this play does is speak aloud the political implications of a person’s most personal possession—body, body, body.
As the body acts as a site reflecting political changes and personal connections, Wish You Were Here also speaks about how these sites can move—through emigration or exile. Toossi shows how two characters in the same room might speak to each other as if thousands of miles away, and how emotional conflict can create physical distance. What makes these characters unusual, however, is their attention to suffering, even when separated by geography and time. In the final scene of the play, Nazanin receives a call from her missing friend, Rana. Rana explains that she moved to Israel when she first left Karaj, that she had a daughter, that now she works at a Pizza Hut. Having matured beyond pussy jokes, she crackles through the phone: “In the long shadow of your existence, I found a home. I could have stayed there forever.” Sitting in the dark theater of the Yale Rep, I felt this line deeply—it gave a heaviness in my very anatomy, rooting me to my seat. Rana says, “I could have stayed there forever.” I could have too, my physical body lingering in the shadow of the play’s emotional impact.
English, the other play that Toossi wrote while still at NYU, went up at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego at the end of January. I told my parents about the play, and said that they should go see it in my stead. I was really hoping that I could spin a ‘generational translation of play about translation’ angle into a review of Wish You Were Here and English. I could call them and ask them their impressions of its characters. Ask them, were you moved? What about your body—did that, too, change? Ask them, did you, too, ever feel as though you could never leave the theater? What about your home?
They said that they weren’t sure, that “we’d need you to interpret this kind of thing for us.” In my head, what they said was—yes—that they wished I was there. I wanted to thrash and sob with them; to talk about the ways that plays can show you beauty; to pick apart their stories in relation to the characters on the stage; to dissect their own immigration stories; to perform a kind of emotional surgery on their lives. I could inspect their bodies, much wiser than my own but so similar, to see if they shone with a drying salt. And these acts would be more political than anything I could write about.
Camille Chang is happy to see/wanting to meet you.