Theater review: ‘Wish You Were Here’ an enlightening, yet funny, look at how lifelong friendship were altered by political shifts in Iran
“Wish You Were Here,” which opens the 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre season, plays like a silly sex comedy, but one which has already announced it’s about something else entirely, something deeper and heavier.
Sanaz Toossi, the playwright who won the Pulitzer Prize this year for another of her plays, “English,” wonderfully juxtaposes the world changing and the mundane in a very funny but meaningful chronicle of Iran from 1978 to 1991.
A group of young women have stayed friends since childhood, gathering for each other’s weddings and other events. Their chatter is fun and saucy and real. There are a lot of references to vaginas, body odors, hair waxing and menstruation. They worry what men, and other women, might think of them. They are getting through life, happy to share their joys and fears with old friends.
But these gatherings take place amid massive cultural changes in their native country of Iran. Each scene takes place a year or two after the one before it. “Wish You Were Here” begins in 1978, just before the revolution that ended the Iranian monarchy. It encompasses the Iran-Iraq war and the rules of Ruhollah Khomeini, Ali Khamenei and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
The play does not delve into the historical details at all. There is unrest. There is subjugation of women. There is violence and upheaval and uncertainty. The beauty of Toossi’s play is that she doesn’t dwell on the conflicts and the politics. She dwells on the daily concerns of women who are trying to live their lives and be their best selves.
They talk about getting married, having sex for the first time and the careers they might have if they are able to return to university. As the years pass, some of the women leave the picture, having gone to the United States or Israel. Some stay in an Iran that feels very different from the one they knew as children. This is justification, resignation, reunion and curiosity.
The play is structured so that the women are having casual, private conversations and opening up to each other. They swear and smoke and play jokes on each other. None of the big events they discuss, whether in the world at large or in their private lives, are actually dramatized on the stage. They talk about weddings before they happen, or trips after they’ve been taken, or work when they are not at it. The talking, and the laidback ease they share with each other, is the point. Outside, the world is changing in unimaginable ways. In the living room, life goes on day by day.
The Yale Rep production livens up the text-heavy script with a smart scenic design by Omid Akbari that shifts its angle slightly (via a discreet stage turntable) for each scene, though the single-room setting barely changes throughout the dozen years covered in the show. The scenes are also broken up by appealing home movie-type projections (designed by Sam Skynner) of the friends frolicking outdoors.
You can hear a radio theater-style version of the 2020 world premiere of “Wish You Were Here” on Audible with the same cast and director as the play’s production at Playwrights Horizon in New York City last year. The Audible version is 20 minutes longer than the version being done at the Yale Rep, a significant difference since it now runs only 100 minutes. The cuts in the script are prudent, and the play is much crisper and quicker onstage, particularly as staged by Sivan Battat, a New York-based director who grew up in Woodbridge and attended ACES Educational Center for the Arts in New Haven. Battat keeps the action playful and frisky and the lifelong friendship vibe strong, making for the starkest possible contrast between the women’s hopes and desires and the oppressions they are facing from government and society.
Honoring the wildly clashing moods of Toossi’s script, this production can get genuinely freewheeling and goofy. When they skitter across the stage to sniff a bridal dress or wax each others’ legs, these are the same laughs you might get from “Menopause the Musical” or a Wendy Wasserstein comedy. But the social drama around them is never forgotten. The massive social changes may barely get mentioned but are deeply felt. How can one swim wearing a hijab, they wonder with tragic alarm.
The six-member, all-female cast of “Wish You Were Here” at Yale Rep are Iran-born or Iranian-American. The show’s pre-show “turn off your phones” announcement is voiced in both English and Farsi. The lead player is Anita Abdinezhad as Nazanin, the character who remains in Iran the longest, but this is truly an ensemble play. Abdinezhad has a gift for balance and level-headedness, able to command the stage and also play it straight to her wilder friends.
The others must travel a trickier path, coming and going unexpectedly and having to make each of their scenes newly vibrant. Vaneh Assadourian maintains a free spirit as Rana, a Jewish girl who flees Iran early in the play. We meet Salme, played by Bahar Beihaghi, when she is resplendent in a bridal gown and about to be married. A much less reserved character is Zari, played with frantic glee by Ava Lalezarzadeh. Shadee Vossoughi delivers sighs and shrugs as one of the more practical members of the group who intends to study medicine. There is also a character known only as “New Friend,” who appears when many of Nazinan’s old friends aren’t around and reprises an embarrassing moment experienced by a different character in a different circumstance earlier in the play.
There’s an interesting circularity and continuity to “Wish You Were Here.” Despite the abrupt changes in their country, there’s a pattern to how life is experienced by these women.
Meanwhile, nobody forgets that there needs to be a lot of comedy in this disarming play that acts a little like the Sartre classic “No Exit,” with horrors outside while the characters try to maintain their cool and deal with each other.
These are all likable characters who get along, miss each other when they’re gone and try to persevere with a smile and a purpose. You leave “Wish You Were Here” both entertained and enlightened.
“Wish You Were Here” by Sanaz Toossi, directed by Sivan Battat, runs through Oct. 28 at the Yale Repertory Theatre, 1120 Chapel St., New Haven. Performances are Tuesdays through Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 2 and 8 p.m. $15-$65. yalerep.org/productions/wish-you-were-here/.
