If you were to peruse Sanaz Toossi’s Instagram, you would find a recent headshot with the tongue-in-cheek caption, “i am an extremely serious artist.” She stares into the camera, head tilted, with a wistful gaze and with a gold necklace pulling focus from her dark black hair. The pendant, hang ing on the gold chain, is Sanaz’s own name in Farsi. Playwright Sanaz Toossi. Lizzie Stern, Literary Director at Playwrights Horizons when they produced Wish You Were Here in 2022, asked Toossi about her views on language. She answered, “I love that language “I love that language fails us. It should.” She went on to describe her acceptance of the limitations of language. “I’ve tried to learn to be comfortable with the inability to fully encapsulate something.” Toossi’s writing makes thoughtful space for the limitations of language. When told by an interviewer that her use of language evokes a sense of homesickness, she responded, “I’ve been looking for that term for a really long time because I think it defines all of my work. Homesickness.” Sanaz Toossi grew up in Orange County, California, always aware of her family’s home in Iran. She was raised in a bilingual household, with parents whose native language was Farsi. “I was a weird theatre kid,” she said of her youth. “When I started writing plays, I was trying to bridge the gap between my Iranian-ness and my American-ness.” Toossi went on to earn an MFA in playwrighting from NYU and had two Off Broadway plays premiere in 2022. Toossi’s first play to receive a major production was English, which was set to premiere in 2020, but was postponed to 2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Called “dazzling, clever, and moving” by the London Times, English is set in Iran in 2008 and follows four adults in an English language class as they anxiously prepare to take the Test of English as a Foreign Language (commonly known as TOEFL). One student, Roya, is in the class so she can learn English to speak with her granddaughter, who was raised in “The Canada” and doesn’t know Farsi. Here in DC, Studio Theatre produced English in 2023, just before it received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The cast of ENGLISH at Studio Theatre. Photo by DJ Corey Photography. In 2022, Playwrights Horizons produced Wish You Were Here, which centers around those celebrations where loved ones are absent. The play follows a tight-knit circle of female friends living in Iran during the Iranian Revolution. The women plan their weddings, talk about their bodies, and comfort one another through the anxieties that plague them. As time passes, the clique finds themselves scattered across the globe. As one character remarks of the whirlwind of circumstance and choice that this friend group faces: “One day you can have a home, and the next, as you are hurtling through the air, you will have to vanquish home.” “Homesickness is the thing that I will always write about,” reflects Toossi, “because I will never have all of the words for it. I think I’m on a quest for all of the words.” Sanaz Toossi’s Wish You Were Here starts performances at Studio Theatre on September 23. Learn more and buy tickets at studiotheatre.org or call the box office at 202.332.3300.The post “On a Quest for All the Words”: Sanaz Toossi’s Homesickness first appeared on Washingtonian. ...read more read less