04/02/2025
Earlier this year, 2023 Drama Prize winner Sanaz Toossi's pathbreaking "English" (lauded by the Pulitzer Board as "a quietly powerful play about four Iranian adults preparing for an English language exam in a storefront school near Tehran, where family separations and travel restrictions drive them to learn a new language that may alter their identities and also represent a new life") made the leap to Broadway at a juncture when it was "also impossible for her to ignore what was happening in the larger world outside the theater," according to Pulitzer Board member Nicole Carroll.
In this episode, we are treated to a behind-the-scenes vantage of Toossi's preparations for the Broadway run — "People can get up and leave your play. You can get flamed in a review. You can be misunderstood. And when it works, it is a reason to live," Toossi reflected at the time — alongside a thoughtful dialogue on the political valences of contemporary theatre between the playwright and 2009/2017 Drama winner Lynn Nottage.
Available below (or wherever you get your podcasts).
In this episode of the Pulitzer on the Road Podcast, 2023 Drama Prize winner Sanaz Toossi and 2009/2017 Drama winner Lynn Nottage discuss the political implications of contemporary theater — and their respectively circuitous journeys toward eminence in their field — as Toossi prepares for the Br...
