A Letter to Sanaz Toossi from Heidi Schreck
Dear Sanaz,
I’m leaving a Saturday matinee of Wish You Were Here—your dazzling love letter to your mother—and my K95 mask is soggy from laugh-crying and also from regular crying. I’m writing this on my phone on the N train because I’m a new mother and there are two babies waiting for me at home to give them milk, wipe their poop, and hold them to my body until they are no longer furious at me for leaving and can believe once again that home is a safe place.
You said the first glimmer of this play came to you while looking at a photograph of your mom and her girlfriends laughing so hard their faces are a blur. It’s the 1970s in Karaj, Iran, and they don’t yet know how drastically the ground is about to shift underneath their feet, that the solace of home and friendships will be lost to the forces of revolution, repression, and ruthless political decisions made by other people’s governments, including ours. You chart the contours of this devastating loss powerfully by fixing your gaze on quotidian realities of these women’s lives. You give us their childhood games, weddings, dirty jokes, and the insistent realities of their bodies: hairdos, manicures, period blood, profligate leg hair, stinky vaginas, possibly ugly feet. You dive into the wild rivers of desire that so often run between women friends, the tight knots of love and need and jealousy and sometimes cruelty that bind us to one another and so often outlast the bonds we have with spouses.
And through all of this your play miraculously also brims with the irrepressible joy of that photograph even in its most painful moments. I feel you delighting in these women, loving them in all their flawed and messy human glory.
A memory just came to me and I think it might be important since I remember so few things since giving birth. (Apparently my daughters ate sections of my brain while they were in utero in order to build their own little brains. That’s a fact, I read it online.) When I was a kid in the 1970s, I once walked in on my mom smoking a cigarette and laughing with her friend Helene Henkle, like ladies in a Virginia Slims commercial. I had never seen my mom smoke before or since and I was elated. The next day I went to school and told everyone proudly: “My mom’s a smoker!” She was pissed off when she found out I was telling people this. It must have been galling to have her child intrude on her moment of private abandon and then shout about it to the world.
Sitting here on the train now, though, in the thrall of your beautiful play, I’m thinking that when I shouted, “My mom is a smoker!” maybe what I really meant is, “My mom is a person!”
And there is something about your play that feels like you shouting “My mom is a person!”—except instead of an eight-year-old girl, you are a grownup artist in the fullness of your power, dreaming your young mother back into existence so that you might know her more deeply. I’m also thinking that this is important work, for all humans. Don’t you think some of the difficulty we as people have in recognizing each other’s full humanity might be rooted in our inability to perceive the full personhood of our mother?
My N train is zooming into Brooklyn now, and suddenly I’m thinking about words like “home” and “safety” and how precarious those concepts are. There was a mass shooting on this train a few days ago, and now I’m jumpy and scared. I have to stay alert, watchful, as if somehow by staying awake I could keep the worst from happening. I am thinking of what your mother lived through, how terrifying it must have been, and how much my years of comfort, as a white American, have cost people all over the world.
It’s now 3 AM; I had to take a long break from writing about your play to feed children and play with them and put them to bed and by that time my brain was a useless rock. (How did our mothers do this, my god?!) Anyway, I’m up because my hormones are swirling in some kind of postpartum/perimenopausal shit stew, and I’m having my period every two weeks, and I wake up sweating around this time every night.
I had a dream about the spell of protection the character Rana casts on her future daughter (you). In this dream, I was watching my daughter on the baby monitor and she stood up in her crib and she was exceptionally tall, a goddess, and she also looked like you, she had your long dark hair, and just walked out of her room a fully grown adult. And in my dream, I said to myself, “Oh the floor will hold her.” And then I woke up thinking of Rana, and also of you, Sanaz, of your extraordinary mind and how in the five years since I first met you as a brilliant young student at NYU, the magic of your artistry has become thrillingly undeniable.
Now I hear a baby crying, “Mama!” Okay I’m back. She’s fine. I think she’s just dreaming of me the way I’m always dreaming of her, the way this play is you dreaming your mother and also yourself into existence. And don’t you think maybe a child dreams her parent into existence too? We create each other, right? It’s not a one-way situation.
And okay now I’m exhausted and a little loopy but the last thing I’m going to say is that watching your play gave me the same feeling I had when I was pregnant and my left boob would throb every time I heard a baby cry.
The rivers of desire that run between all of us are wild and unpredictable, aren’t they?
So much love to you and thank you for your astonishing play.
Heidi
 | Heidi Schreck is a writer/performer living in Brooklyn with her partner Kip Fagan and their awesome twin daughters. Her latest play What the Constitution Means to Me was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize and played an extended run on Broadway before touring the country. |
