Wish You Were Here
I recall watching, at age 12, Craig Lucas's play Reckless in my hometown of Costa Mesa, and feeling like a blank in me had been filled. Over the next 35 years, if anything can be said to be an organizing principle of my life, it has been a compulsion to get as close to making theater — specifically new works of theater — as I can. It’s a gift, this compulsion, but sometimes also a curse because, as close as I get, I've never been able to write a play myself. I don't understand how anyone does it. I often feel shy and lumpy in the face of anyone who's able to make one, especially one with the ineffable depth and power of Sanaz Toossi's play Wish You Were Here.
There's a pervasive, almost uncanny intimacy in this play that — as much as I pore through the pages in search of its source — I don't understand, and for which I struggle to find the words. Perhaps, as Lizzie Stern posits in her insightful accompanying essay, Words to a Feeling, there is no accurate word for it in our language. The play conjures a feeling so vivid, but which sits just on the other side of my ability to articulate it, which is perhaps the reason I’m trapped in its thrall.
A synopsis of Wish You Were Here will tell you the play tracks the friendships of five brilliant, funny, and generally awesome Iranian women over the course of 13 years, from 1978–1991, as the Persian monarchy fell and was replaced by an Islamic Republic. Incrementally, their home becomes unfamiliar and unsafe, and we see the toll it takes on their tight-knit circle. It’s the story of diaspora from the perspective of those who stay home to live through the gradual re-composition of their world.
But at the same time, another movement is at work in the play, a kind of silent attrition that’s inexorable and deeply human. Searching for the right words to describe it, my thoughts jump to Act Three of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, 27 perfect pages in which Emily Webb, having died in childbirth, is granted a momentary return to the living world, where she can see the precious minutiae that made up her life, but which are invisible to us while we live:
EMILY
Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? – every, every minute?
STAGE MANAGER
No. (Pause.) The saints and poets, maybe – they do some.
The Stage Manager’s universe, as conjured in these two sentences, like most theologies, contains layers of experience: one, the daily life we live, the routine, the grind, where time flies by us; and then another, enlightened experience, which harnesses time and exposes tiny, daily miracles as we live them. Like the saints and prophets, yes, and the Buddha — but I love Thornton Wilder because he added, crucially, “and poets.”
On one level, Wish You Were Here behaves in a way that’s not unfamiliar. As a text, it’s 117 pages in which five close friends — each etched with the sharpest, tiniest pencil that ever existed — pursue their best lives, which may or may not include one another. They mitigate, make deals, trade dirty jokes, attack, defend, adjust expectations. All of this in 19,417 words, selected and placed in sequence to create a narrative arranged into ten linear, chronological scenes.
But what astonishes me about Wish You Were Here, as elemental as it sounds, is how Sanaz arranges all of these play-ingredients in just the right way that it opens up a world inside the play, between its pieces. It’s as though the play pokes a hole in that membrane which separates the human, banal level of experience from one more heightened: the layer visible only to “saints and poets” who “realize life while they live it.” Inside the minute dynamics that play out before us on this stage is an illumination of life that’s more vivid, more lifey (to make up a new word) than human beings have access to.
In Wish You Were Here, life moves at a pace that’s more or less how we experience it in our own day-to-day. But as Sanaz writes it, life also has a way of slowing down, stopping, zooming in, making the intricate details visible and dissecting them so we can realize what makes a home and holds a friendship. It somehow offers a glimpse of time itself. I wish I understood how it happens.