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The 2023 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Drama
For a distinguished play by an American author, preferably original in its source and dealing with American life, Fifteen thousand dollars ($15,000).

English, by Sanaz Toossi

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.
Sanaz Toossi accepts the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Drama from Columbia University President Emeritus Lee Bollinger. (Diane Bondareff/The Pulitzer Prizes)

Winning Work

English

By

Sanaz Toossi

Official teaser trailer. (Atlantic Theater Company/Roundabout Theatre Company)

DIRECTED BY KNUD ADAMS

LINDA GROSS THEATER

FEBRUARY 5 – MARCH 20

2020 Steinberg Playwright Award and the Laurents/Hatcher Foundation Award winner Sanaz Toossi returns to Atlantic following her Middle Eastern MixFest debut!

Two words set in motion award-winning playwright Sanaz Toossi’s intricate and profound New York debut: “English Only.” This is the mantra that rules one classroom in Iran, where four adult students are preparing for the TOEFL — the Test of English as a Foreign Language. Chasing fluency through a maze of word games, listening exercises, and show-and-tell sessions, they hope that one day, English will make them whole. But it might be splitting them each in half.

Running time: approximately 100 minutes, with no intermission

-- from the Atlantic Theater Company/Roundabout Theatre Company production page

Biography

Sanaz Toossi is an Iranian-American playwright from Orange County, California. Her plays include the critically acclaimed, award-winning ENGLISH (co-production Atlantic Theater Company/Roundabout Theatre Company) and WISH YOU WERE HERE (Playwrights Horizons; Williamstown/Audible, released 2020). She is currently under commission at Atlantic Theater Company (Launch commission; Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation grant), Roundabout Theatre Company, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Manhattan Theatre Club, South Coast Repertory, and Oregon Shakespeare Festival (American Revolutions Cycle). In television, Sanaz recently staffed on INVITATION TO A BONFIRE (AMC); A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN (Amazon); FIVE WOMEN (Marielle Heller/ Big Beach); and sold an original idea, THE PERSIANS, to FX with Joe Weisberg & Joel Fields attached as Executive Producers. Sanaz is a member of Youngblood and the Middle Eastern American Writers Lab at the Lark, and an alum of Clubbed Thumb’s Early Career Writers’ Group. She was the 2019 P73 Playwriting Fellow, a recipient of the 2020 Steinberg Playwright Award, and the 2022 recipient of The Horton Foote Award. MFA: NYU Tisch.

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Drama in 2023:

Aleshea Harris

An ambitious drama, inspired by Sophocles, of a community shaped by the trauma of a nameless war they have been dealing with for generations, and the ancestors they mourn, a solemn but also joyful work.

Lloyd Suh

An account of emigrants who traveled from China to San Francisco and suffered in the shadows of a strange new world, a historical portrait of the ruthless dynamic of immigration that is also timely.

The Jury

David John Chávez(Chair)

Chair, American Theatre Critics Association; Correspondent, San Jose Mercury News

Vinson Cunningham

Staff Writer, The New Yorker

Soraya Nadia McDonald

Senior Culture Critic, Andscape

Heidi Schreck

Playwright, Brooklyn, N.Y.

Kristina Wong

Performance Artist/Playwright, Los Angeles, Calif.

Winners in Drama

2022

James Ijames

A funny, poignant play that deftly transposes "Hamlet" to a family barbecue in the American South to grapple with questions of identity, kinship, responsibility, and honesty.
2021

Katori Hall

A funny, deeply felt consideration of Black masculinity and how it is perceived, filtered through the experiences of a loving gay couple and their extended family as they prepare for a culinary competition.
2020

Michael R. Jackson

A metafictional musical that tracks the creative process of an artist transforming issues of identity, race, and sexuality that once pushed him to the margins of the cultural mainstream into a meditation on universal human fears and insecurities.
2019

Jackie Sibblies Drury

A hard-hitting drama that examines race in a highly conceptual, layered structure, ultimately bringing audiences into the actors’ community to face deep-seated prejudices.
See All Drama

2023 Prize Winners

Commentary

Kyle Whitmire of AL.com, Birmingham

For measured and persuasive columns that document how Alabama's Confederate heritage still colors the present with racism and exclusion, told through tours of its first capital, its mansions and monuments–and through the history that has been omitted.
Investigative Reporting

Staff of The Wall Street Journal

For sharp accountability reporting on financial conflicts of interest among officials at 50 federal agencies, revealing those who bought and sold stocks they regulated and other ethical violations by individuals charged with safeguarding the public’s interest.
See All 2023 Winners