The playful, sometimes wistful, Wish You Were Here by Sanaz Toossi, the American playwright of Iranian descent, was first performed in the USA to positive reviews.
Set in the living rooms of homes in Karaj, not far from the capital of Iran, it follows the friendship of five Iranian women from 1978, when they are in their twenties, to the year 1990.
The show opens in the home of Salme (Emily Renée) in a wedding dress and the five women talking about clothes, nerves and parts of their body, from Zari’s supposedly hideous toes to Rana (Juliette Motamed) “fanning her vagina” saying she is “practically geysering”. Nazanin (Afsaneh Dehrouyeh) adds that, “my pussy could iron a shirt.”
Moving on to the subject of the penis, Shideh (Isabella Nefar) claims if a man saw Zari’s toes, “I think his penis would fall off.” And since it’s Salme’s wedding, they ask her if she has ever seen a penis and wonder if they should tell her what happens “when you anatomically merge.” Such an idea gets Salme worrying that her vagina might smell, so one of them goes beneath Salme’s dress to give her a consensual “pussy audit.”
It could be any group of young women, and the style of the conversations changes only slightly over the years, leaving you to wonder if there is anything else going on in their world.
In 1979, we are taken to Zari’s wedding day, where Shideh is plucking her eyebrows as the conversation shifts to “how you pee” in an enormous dress. Zari (Maryam Grace) is nervous, revealing she “had a dream that my boobs got so big I fell off a cliff,” which leads to a discussion of virginity.
Among the other updates on the group, we hear that Shideh is applying to American universities, the Shah of Iran has left the country and Rana, along with her Jewish family, has disappeared.
In 1981, given a war with Iran is taking place, one of them is hunched under a table, and we are told Salme is having dreams of being married to Saddam Hussain. Shidah is in America, and Rana is probably in Israel.
The next scene in 1981 takes us to Nazanin having her legs waxed by Salme, who reveals she did try to get out of the country via the French embassy. That’s followed by Nazanin’s wedding of 1982 and more talk of “dick”, having babies and Zari wanting to leave the country.
The friendship of the five is warm and believable. Salme seems the most innocent, kind and religious, Shideh seems the most outspoken, while Nazanin and Rana seem to have a special affection for each other, and late in the play appear in a very moving scene.
However, the conversations seem narrowly focused on a version of young women overly concerned with appearance and sexual relations. We hear barely anything about their lives beyond these topics. Even the exit of one of the characters in an improbable event is discussed so briefly it can leave you puzzled. It's almost as if the writer is keen to give us a young female sanitised mirror image of a group of bantering young lads at a series of bachelor nights over many years.
Surprisingly, the political context the writer presumably wants us to bear in mind, given the dates are flashed above the stage at the start of each scene, gets hardly a mention. 1979 may have been a revolution in Iran during which thousands were killed with events in Iran grabbing the attention of the world, but the friends have nothing to say about it beyond the mention that the Shah has left the country but not why. (He was on the run.)
Yes, the play gets laughs and paints a cosy picture of female friendship, but it lacks depth, context, politics and believability.