Sanaz Toossi wrote English as her final thesis project for an MFA degree at New York University. The story of a small group of students of varying ages preparing for the Test of English as a Foreign Language in Iran, the play went on to receive five Tony Award nominations, including one for Best Play, as well as a Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2023. It was Toossi’s first theatrical work.

Toossi was born and raised in the Orange County town of Irvine, California, the only child of Iranian immigrants. “I hated Irvine when I was growing up, because everything is really safe there,” she says. “But now that I’m an adult, I realize how lucky I was, not only to grow up somewhere safe, but to grow up in a huge Iranian diaspora, with the musicality of people slipping between Farsi and English. It’s probably why I became a playwright.”

Robert Ito: What inspired you to write English?

Sanaz Toossi: I wrote it as a response to the first travel ban—more colloquially called the Muslim ban—at a time of heightened xenophobia in the United States. I was wounded by the anti-immigrant rhetoric that I felt, and do feel, is poisoning our country. The idea was born out of seeing my parents condescended to because they spoke with accents.