Sanaz Toossi

Sanaz Toossi (born 1991/1992)

Life and career Toossi was born in Orange County, California, where she grew up. speaking Persian in her family home and English outside it, and visited Iran regularly when she was growing up.

Toossi earned her bachelor's degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara, majoring in pre-law.

The first production of English, scheduled for 2020 at the Roundabout Theatre Company's Underground Black Box Theatre, was postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The play opened at the Atlantic Theater Company's Linda Gross Theater, in a co-production with Roundabout, on February 22, 2022. English was staged in 2023 and 2024 across North America, in Boston; Washington, D.C.; Toronto; Montreal; Berkeley, California; Atlanta; Pittsfield, Massachusetts; Seattle; Chicago; and Minneapolis; in the UK in May and June 2024, first staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company and then at the Kiln Theatre in London; in Melbourne and Canberra, Australia in August and September 2024; and in January 2025, at the Todd Haimes Theater, as its Broadway debut. Toossi herself starred in the 2023 Barrington Stage production of English as Elham.

Wish You Were Here Toossi wrote Wish You Were Here long after English, though it debuted first. She has called it a love letter to her mother. It has been described as a "drama"

Wish You Were Here premiered on July 1, 2020, as an audio performance released on Audible by the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Its stage debut at Playwrights Horizons began previews April 13, 2022 and officially opened on May 3, 2022. Its run there was extended at least twice. Toossi acted in that performance, playing the role of Rana, on May 21 and 22, 2022. It was staged at South Coast Repertory in southern California in January–February 2025.

Awards In 2020, Toossi was one of 20 playwrights named as winners of the Steinberg Playwright Awards by the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust. She won the 2021 National Theatre Conference's Barrie & Bernice Stavis Playwright Award as "an outstanding emerging playwright". In 2022 the Dramatists Guild of America names Toossi as winner of the Horton Foote Award, for "a dramatist whose work seeks to plumb the ineffable nature of being human." She received a special citation for emerging talent, based on English and Wish You Were Here, in the 2022 New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards.

English received the Williamstown Theatre Festival's L. Arnold Weissberger New Play Award in 2020, the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play in 2022, the 2022 Obie Award for Best New American Play, the 2021-22 John Gassner Award (for a new American play, preferably by a new playwright) from the Outer Critics Circle Awards, the Dramatists Guild's 2023 Hull-Warriner Award (co-winner), and the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for drama.

Wish You Were Here was nominated for the 2023 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play.

Works As playwright English (2022) Wish You Were Here (2022)

As screenwriter A League of Their Own (2022) Invitation to a Bonfire