Sanaz Toossi's Wish You Were Here Finds Laughter and Heartbreak in a Lifelong Friendship at Studio Theatre
It is 1978 in Karaj, Iran, and a living room is erupting with the joyful chaos only best friends can create. One young woman fusses over the bride's hair, another adjusts her wedding dress, and a third gives a pedicure to a bespectacled pal while jokes, gossip, and gleefully irreverent teasing fly in every direction. So begins Sanaz Toossi's "Wish You Were Here," now playing at Studio Theatre in an acclaimed production that has been extended through Nov 8, 2026. Toossi, who won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for "English" (which Studio produced that same year), returns to the company with a play that critics have embraced as both wickedly funny and deeply moving.
The story follows five inseparable friends across thirteen years, from the eve of Salme's wedding to 1991. In the background, history is reshaping their country: the Iranian Revolution topples the monarchy, universities close, women's freedoms narrow, and the Iran-Iraq War brings air raid sirens to their doorsteps. Yet Toossi keeps these seismic events mostly at the edges of the conversation. This is not a play about revolution but about the people living through it, and about how friendships stretch, strain, and sometimes break as one friend after another leaves the country until only one remains.
What audiences and critics alike have fallen for is the play's humor. Toossi's women are witty, self-aware, and blissfully unfiltered, trading both clean and dirty banter with an honesty that feels instantly recognizable to anyone who has a close circle of friends. When the bride feels swallowed up by her enormous white gown, one friend helpfully tells her she looks like a sexy avalanche victim. That comedy draws the audience in, and the production sustains its lightness for as long as it possibly can, which makes the moments when it finally gives way all the more poignant. The raucous opening scene, in particular, has been singled out for the way it echoes long after it ends, as the carefree giddiness of the early years gives way to characters who are more thoughtful, more fearful, and older than their years.
Director Sivan Battat has earned high praise for letting silent moments linger just long enough to say what words cannot, and for drawing out a natural, lived-in chemistry among the ensemble. Ellen Nikbakht carries the evening as Nazanin, the engineering student whose gradual transformation over the years has been called masterful, while Ari Derambakhsh is splendidly flamboyant as the free-spirited Rana, who is Jewish and shares a special bond with Nazanin. Ellena Eshraghi is funny and endearing as the scatterbrained Zari, Shadee Vossoughi brings dynamism and quiet grace to the aspiring doctor Shideh, and Layan Elwazani is fittingly reserved as the devout Salme, letting just the slightest cracks of emotion show beneath her poise. Ege Yalcinbas rounds out the cast as a newer addition to the group.
The design team adds considerable texture. Omid Akbari's streamlined set, centered on a white sofa and coffee table with a movable wall suggesting the different living rooms, provides the backdrop for Doaa Ouf's projections, home-movie-style glimpses of the friends together and celebrating that quietly convey everything that has been lost. Kenny Neal's sound design sends missile warning sirens wailing through the theatre while the women try to play backgammon by candlelight under Nic Vincent's lighting, and Shahrzad Mazaheri's wedding costumes, with their veils and sweeping skirts, pop vividly against the spare surroundings.
With Iran frequently in the headlines, "Wish You Were Here" carries an added timeliness, but its real power is universal. It is a love letter to female friendship and to the stubborn determination to keep laughing, keep living, and keep each other close even as the world shifts beneath their feet. As one of the characters puts it, just because there is a war does not mean they have to be boring.
"Wish You Were Here" runs approximately one hour and 45 minutes with no intermission and plays through Nov 8, 2026, in the Mead Theatre at Studio Theatre, 1501 14th Street NW, Washington, DC.