WIT 2025: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Sanaz Toossi in Conversation with Vinson Cunningham

The Authors Guild Foundation presents Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Sanaz Toossi in conversation with Vinson Cunningham as part of the 2025 WIT Literary Festival. The festival takes place in the Berkshires, but is livestreamed nationwide. Register now with discount code WITFRIEND.

Every play opens a new door.

Two of the best plays on Broadway this year were Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Purpose and Sanaz Toossi’s English. While Purpose blends comedy and drama to tell the story of a Chicago family whose patriarch was a leader in the Civil Rights movement, English brings audiences into a classroom where Iranian adults grapple with how learning a new language alters their identities.

Both Jacobs-Jenkins and Toossi have been praised for creating perceptive and absorbing works that hold past, present, and future feelings in the same space. Join these two Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrights for a wide-ranging conversation on what drew them to theater writing in the first place, the connection between performance and history, how they approach universal themes like representation and displacement, and their close collaborations with ensemble casts. “The pleasure is being surprised by how the form comes toward you and goes away from you,” Jacobs-Jenkins has said. “Every amazing moment in playwriting is linked to a revelation in acting.”

For Toossi, the origins of English date to the travel ban imposed by the U.S. government in early 2017 that affected many Muslim countries. When the play opened on Broadway in early 2025, she told the audience, “I am the daughter of two immigrants. It’s why I wrote the show, and it’s been my artistic North Star—to write us with dignity. We’re here because we will dictate the terms of who we are, and we will draw the contours of our identity. We will express ourselves as tender and contradictory and fallible. I do not want to live in a world without story, without make-believe, where we don’t go on a stage and tell the truth about who we are.”