“When I wrote the play, I hoped simply that we would be better to the people who have immigrated to this country, and that we would understand that … they’re three-dimensional people who left things behind, you know?” Toossi says over Zoom from Los Angeles, where she has recently moved.

“English,” which premiered (after some pandemic-related delays) at New York’s Atlantic Theater Company in 2022, received the Lucille Lortel Award for outstanding new off-Broadway play last year. In his review of that production, Washington Post critic Peter Marks described the play as “a reminder that the aggressive public face of a country, whether an Iran or a Russia, does not fairly represent the face of its public.”

Indeed, Toossi hopes her work can fill a gap in American theater, which has offered few nuanced depictions of ordinary Iranians onstage. “I just grew up so frustrated with what people thought being an Iranian was,” says the playwright, who was raised by Iranian immigrant parents in Orange County, Calif., and made regular trips to their homeland as a child. “I’ve always wanted people to see who we are. We came from this beautiful, vibrant culture; we are people who love poetry, and art. My grandfather even in his late stages of dementia was still reciting poetry.”

Studio’s production is set in spring 2009, in the lead-up to the pro-democracy Green Movement that swept Iran after the disputed reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president, but that’s more or less incidental. Toossi writes in a broadly comedic vein that keeps the focus on the characters’ feelings and moods, rather than larger social or political dynamics.

In “English” and her second play, “Wish You Were Here,” which also premiered off-Broadway in New York last year, almost all of Toossi’s characters are female, something she says came about unconsciously. “My experience of being in Iran is being surrounded by … fierce, loud, sometimes irritating but very loving women,” she says, with a laugh. “So it’s just shaped so much of me.”