The West Coast premiere of “Wish You Were Here” at South Coast Repertory represents a homecoming of sorts for author Sanaz Toossi. A first-generation Iranian American who grew up in Orange County, she worked in various capacities at the Costa Mesa theater and credits the SCR production of Amy Herzog’s “4000 Miles” with inspiring her to pursue playwriting rather than enroll in law school.
Toossi returns to her old stomping grounds in elevated style. Her play “English,” which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for drama, is receiving its Broadway premiere this month. The world premieres of “English” and “Wish You Were Here” in 2022 established Toossi as a brave new voice in the American theater.
Both plays, set in Iran, deal with characters who are forced to consider leaving their homeland for opportunities that are no longer possible if they stay. Toossi steers clear of political editorializing. The ideological business of regimes stays in the background. Her focus is more personally attuned. She goes to great pains to show the way the women in her plays internally manage the fluctuating feasibility of their dreams.
“Wish You Were Here,” divided into 10 scenes, surveys the period in Iran from 1978 to 1991, when the society was radically transformed by the 1979 revolution. The tumultuous pace of change is reflected in the friendships of five women, whose most meaningful bond seems to be the one they have with one another.
Weddings play a crucial role in the play, but grooms remain offstage. We are privy to the intimate conversations of the women as they prepare the bride for the big day. Benevolent, innocent Salme (Tara Grammy), the peacemaker of the group, is the first to wed, followed by Zari (Mitra Jouhari), who doesn’t let her insecurities stand in the way of her fun.
Between these nuptials, Rana (Sahar Bibiyan), the puckishly extroverted Jewish friend, disappears without a trace. Conflicts with the United States and Iraq have created a pervasive atmosphere of suspicion and alarm. Sirens leave the women debating whether to flee to a bomb shelter.
“The shelters smell like mold and pits and I’d rather die here where it only smells like pits,” Nazanin (Awni Abdi-Bahri) says. The other women are amused by Nazanin’s outrageousness. They’re also wary of her abrasiveness.
Nazanin is the most affected by Rana’s disappearance, but she’s too angry to acknowledge how much she misses her best friend. Leaving Iran, in her view, is tantamount to betrayal. She and Rana promised each other that they’d never get married or have children. Now she looks forlornly ahead to a life without escape from a punishing orthodoxy.
Eventually, Nazanin does submit to marriage. Her wedding day, however, is hardly a joyous occasion.
Nazanin goes through the same preparations as Salme, who has turned supremely pious in the intervening years, and Zari, who has grown more level-headed, not to say jaded. But Nazanin has succumbed to a destiny that’s not her own. She had dreams of being an engineer, but the universities were closed for so long that those dreams inevitably expired.
Bossy Shideh (Artemis Pebdani) admits to feeling sad at weddings, knowing they entail a loss for friends. She’s pursuing her medical education in America, which exacts a more drastic form of loss, but Iranian existence for women is a quagmire of contradictions.
The conversations in “Wish You Were Here” talk around the geopolitical realities. Toossi wants us to experience the casual intimacies of these women. There’s much discussion of bodily odors and menstrual blood, but little about gender oppression under a theocratic order.
What comes across with painful truthfulness is the way history can hijack hopes. For all their behind-the scenes banter, the characters in “Wish You Were Here” remain to a degree opaque. The outlines of their personalities are set, but there’s a murkiness to their identities.
There are many reasons for the anger Nazanin exudes, but her meanness conceals more than it gives away. Toossi doesn’t want to dig too deeply into the nature of Nazanin’s feelings for Rana, perhaps because Nazanin herself is closed off from discovering what she really feels. But the play reaches a stalemate with itself.
If the dialogue were more sharply written and the characters more vividly defined, there might not be the same lingering sense that the playwright is skirting something politically dangerous. Toossi has a strong sense of her material. But by so closely defining her characters by their sociological predicament, she can’t expect us to respond to them in purely Chekhovian terms. “Wish You Were Here” doesn’t have that kind of psychological fine drawing or existential breadth.
The production, directed by Mina Morita, renders the play in solid, if slightly sluggish, fashion. The scene changes weigh down the overall pace. Scenic designer Afsoon Pajoufar creates believably lived-in domestic environments, but they need not have been treated so literally by Morita.
The ensemble recreates the communal energy of the characters, though sometimes what’s italicized in the script might have been more potently conveyed with underplaying. Some of the defiant humor about women’s bodies feels tendentious and forced. The more powerful moments are those in which the unspoken sorrow between the women is allowed to hover palpably, as when Nazanin instructs Zari not to say anything in advance if she plans to leave Iran.
There’s something frustrating about Nazanin’s embrace of ignorance. But Abdi-Bahri suggests the feelings of futility that Nazanin must be experiencing. Why discuss what you are helpless to alter? That’s a political dilemma. It’s also, as Toossi shows, a poignantly human one.
