Every day is opening night.

Audible Theater & Wish You Were Here Contact:
Chris Boneau / Michelle Farabaugh
cboneau@bbbway.com / mfarabaugh@bbbway.com

Jessica Shoffel / Dana Honor
shoffel@audible.com / dhonor@audible.com

Williamstown Theatre Festival Contact:
Rick Miramontez / Aaron Meier
rick@omdkc.com / aaron@omdkc.com
212 695 7400

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, PLEASE

“WISH YOU WERE HERE”
WORLD PREMIERE WRITTEN BY SANAZ TOOSSI
DIRECTED BY GAYE TAYLOR UPCHURCH 

PRESENTED AS PART OF THE
2020 WILLIAMSTOWN THEATRE FESTIVAL SEASON
ON AUDIBLE THEATER

IS AVAILABLE WORLDWIDE
TOMORROW, APRIL 1 AT 3AM ET
ON AUDIBLE PLUS 

New York, NY (March 31, 2021) – The Williamstown Theatre Festival (Mandy Greenfield, Artistic Director) and Audible Theater (Kate Navin, Artistic Producer) world premiere presentation of Wish You Were Here is available worldwide tomorrow, April 1 at 3am ET within the Audible Plus catalog. Wish You Were Here is part of the 2020 Williamstown Theatre Festival summer season produced on Audible, the leading creator and provider of premium audio storytelling.

Written by Iranian-American playwright Sanaz Toossi and directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch, Wish You Were Here features Nikki Massoud, Marjan Neshat, Nazanin Nour, Artemis Pebdani, and Roxanna Hope Radja.

Nazanin (Marjan Neshat) and her friends are on the brink of adulthood. As they prepare for a wedding, outside their living room the Iranian Revolution simmers and threatens to alter the course of their lives. Set over the course of 14 years, Sanaz Toossi’s timely world premiere play, directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch, shines a light on the daring potential of friendship amid the relentless aftershocks of political upheaval.

The creative team also includes Sinan Refik Zafar (sound designer), Tyler Thomas (assistant director), Maia Directors (cultural competence consultant), and composers Brandon Terzic, Rufus Cappadocia, Alby Roblejo and Sinan Refik Zafar.

Wish You Were Here’s running time is approximately two hours.

As previously announced, Playwright Horizons’ production of Wish You Were Here, co-produced with Williamstown Theatre Festival, will be part of their upcoming season.

Forged during and in response to a fraught moment in history, the unprecedented collaboration between Williamstown Theatre Festival and Audible Theater preserves the Festival season in a different format, provides continued work for the artists involved in the Festival season, and produces a body of work that will be made available for global Audible listeners to enjoy and experience. It also marks the first time that a theatrical season of work will be produced on Audible.

The final production in WTF’s 2020 season on Audible – the new musical Row with a book by Daniel Goldstein and music and lyrics by Dawn Landes – will be released on Thursday, April 8.

The other titles in the season are all available now within the Audible Plus catalog: the Tennessee Williams masterpiece A Streetcar Named Desire, Photograph 51 by Anna Ziegler, Animals by Stacy Osei-Kuffour, Chonburi International Hotel & Butterfly Club by Shakina Nayfack, and Dominique Morisseau’s Paradise Blue.

Special access to all seven titles in the WTF Season on Audible is available to eligible WTF donors; visit www.wtfestival.org/support for more information.

For more information about Williamstown Theatre Festival, please visit www.wtfestival.org. For more information about Audible, please visit www.audible.com.

ABOUT WILLIAMSTOWN THEATRE FESTIVAL

Few institutions have as profound an impact on the American theatrical landscape as the Tony Award-winning Williamstown Theatre Festival. For over six decades, Williamstown Theatre Festival has brought emerging and professional theatre artists together in the Berkshires to create a thrilling summer festival of diverse, world premiere plays and musicals, bold new revivals, and a rich array of accompanying cultural events.

In response to the unprecedented challenges of 2020, Williamstown Theatre Festival continued its long history of artistic innovation, collaborating with Audible, the leading creator and provider of premium audio storytelling. The Festival’s initiative ensured the voices of artists could be heard loudly and clearly around the globe during an extraordinary moment when theatre’s power to inspire, move, and heal was most needed. The result—the WTF Season on Audible—is a complete collection of new and reimagined works defined by artistic excellence, cultural diversity and relevance, and unbounded reach and crafted by some of the most influential and provocative American theatre artists of today.

For 66 years, artists have been drawn to Williamstown Theatre Festival to make great theatre in an environment conducive to artistic risk-taking. Matthew Broderick, Audra McDonald, Dominique Morisseau, Mary-Louise Parker, Susan Stroman, Uma Thurman, and Blair Underwood are just a few of the luminous theatre artists who have worked at the Festival. Many others, including Chris Pine, Kate Hudson, Paul Giamatti, Allison Janney, Brie Larson, George C. Wolfe, and Kiefer Sutherland, began their careers at the Festival.

In addition, Williamstown Theatre Festival continues to grow new programs. Among the thriving new initiatives are COMMUNITY WORKS—a one-of-a-kind community-engaged theatre program—and the Andrew Martin-Weber New Play and Musical Commissioning Program, through which new work is created year-round by theatre artists including Jocelyn Bioh, Nathan Alan Davis, Halley Feiffer, Justin Levine, Matthew Lopez, Jiehae Park, Benjamin Scheuer, and many others. Productions and artists shaped at the Festival fill theatres in New York City and around the world. In the abbreviated 2019-20 theatrical season alone, Williamstown Theatre Festival was represented or scheduled to be represented on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and regionally by The Sound Inside and Grand Horizons, both of which received Tony Award nominations for Best Play, The Rose Tattoo, Seared, Selling Kabul, Unknown Soldier, Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow, and Lempicka. Cost of Living, which was developed and premiered at Williamstown Theatre Festival, was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Learn more about Williamstown Theatre Festival at wtfestival.org.

ABOUT AUDIBLE THEATER

Audible Theater makes outstanding performances and powerful storytelling available to millions of people all over the world. As part of this initiative, Audible has produced Girls & Boys with Carey Mulligan, The Half-Life of Marie Curie with Kate Mulgrew, Harry Clarke starring Billy Crudup, Billy Crystal’s Have A Nice Day with Annette Bening and Kevin Kline, the revival of Aasif Mandvi’s Sakina’s Restaurant, and many others at the Minetta Lane Theatre in New York City. In May 2018, Audible announced that the Minetta Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village will serve as its creative home for live performances in New York. Audible hosts and produces a wide variety of live performances at the Minetta Lane including dramatic plays, comedic shows, engaging panel discussions, and more, with Audible members receiving exclusive access to discounted tickets and related audio content. Audible was co-producer for the Broadway transfer of the Tony Award-nominated Latin History for Morons written by and starring John Leguizamo and for Sea Wall /A Life starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Tom Sturridge. The initiative also saw the release of John Lithgow’s Stories By Heart, Judith Light’s All The Ways To Say I Love You, Sharon Washington’s Feeding The Dragon, and more. Since June 2017, Audible has commissioned 40 theater playwrights to receive support from its $5 million Emerging Playwrights Fund dedicated to developing innovative English-language works from around the globe. The $5 million fund enables the creation of original plays driven by language and voice, keeping with Audible’s core commitment to elevating listening experiences through powerful performances and extraordinary vocal storytelling.

Audible, Inc., an Amazon.com, Inc. subsidiary (NASDAQ:AMZN), is the leading creator and provider of premium audio storytelling, offering customers a new way to enhance and enrich their lives every day. Audible content includes more than 600,000 audio programs from leading audiobook publishers, broadcasters, entertainers, magazine and newspaper publishers, and business information providers.

# # # #

www.wtfestival.org
www.facebook.com/wtfestival
www.instagram.com/wtfestival
www.twitter.com/wtfest

www.audible.com/theater
www.facebook.com/audibletheater
www.instagram.com/audibletheater
www.twitter.com/audibletheater