Sanaz Toossi and Lynn Nottage: The Politics of Playwriting

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 host and 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 between the playwright and 2009/2017 Drama winner Lynn Nottage.

In addition to exploring their heterogeneous backgrounds (Toossi considered law as a fallback profession, while the STEM-inclined Nottage was briefly "pushed into [the] pocket" of considering a medical career before taking theater courses), both trailblazers discuss surmounting negative reviews, the political valences of their respective works and subverting the imprimatur of the Drama Prize beyond its stipulated criterion of dealing "preferably" with "American life" in novel ways.

A transcript to this episode is available here.

Click here to learn more about the Pulitzer on the Road Podcast and to listen to more episodes. 

The Pulitzer on the Road Podcast is a production of the Pulitzer Prize Board and is produced by Pineapple Street Studios. Our host is Nicole Carroll, Pulitzer Board member and professor of practice at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. Senior producer is Justine Daum, and executive producers are Bari Finkel and Pulitzer Administrator Marjorie Miller.

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