21st-Century Playwrights Book Club: English / Wish You Were Here

In our 21st-Century Playwrights Book Club—you guessed it! We read plays that have been written in the 21st-century and then we meet to discuss them, reading sections of the play aloud. This month, we're reading English / Wish You Were Here [https://lizsbookbar.com/item/5nyr0NqOrCz1kHbDyOoi7Q] by Sanaz Toossi. The meetings will be led by Lily—actor, musician, and LBB bookseller. Two breakout plays by an Iranian-American playwright that examine the human costs of migration, both for those who leave their home country and for those who stay. Sanaz Toossi’s English is a comic and empathetic play about a group of Iranian students taking an English language class in the hopes of passing the challenging TOEFL exam. Navigating word games and listening exercises, the students make every effort to become fluent enough to migrate abroad in order to pursue their disparate goals—one hopes to reunite with her Canadian son, another wishes to pursue medical school in Australia. All feel a tension between their Iranian homeland and their hoped-for future. In Wish You Were Here, the focus shifts to a close-knit group of women who initially decide to remain in Iran following the 1979 Islamic Revolution. However, priorities shift as their fluctuating friendships begin to mirror the quickly changing political realities of the country. Taken together, these two plays provide a deeply humanizing portrait of the complex effects of diaspora both within and outside of Iran.