Broadway review by Adam Feldman
“Why do we learn language?” asks Marjan (Marjan Neshat) to the English class she teaches in Iran. There are practical reasons, to be sure; several of her students need to pass the standardized international Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) so they can travel abroad. But for Marjan, who once spent nine years living in the U.K., the answer goes deeper than that. We learn language, she says, "to speak our souls": “To speak. And to… [motions to her ear] listen. To the insides of others.”
That’s the guiding philosophy of Sanaz Toossi’s ear-opening English, which premiered at the Atlantic in 2022. Now, having won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, it has migrated to Broadway under the sponsorship of the Roundabout, with its identity entirely intact. Director Knud Adams and his original cast of five re-create the magic of the original production without a stammer, stumble or waver.
English | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus
If Toossi’s thoughtful and searching play has things to teach us—about character, culture, postcolonial identity—it does so through immersion. We first see Marjan’s classroom from the outside, through a window. But Marsha Ginsberg’s boxed set soon rotates to invite us inside; it keeps turning throughout the play to give us new angles, and Toossi does the same. Like any grammar, English has rules and structures that it carefully maintains, but enough exceptions and variations to provide character and texture. It unfolds fluently, but not glibly; its choices of word have purpose and care.
To make us feel at home in 2008 in Karaj, a cosmopolitan city about 30 miles from Teheran, Toossi makes beautiful use of one device in particular. We hear all the dialogue in English, whether the characters are meant to be speaking to each other in English or Farsi. But the difference, to us, is clear. In Farsi, their words come easily and quickly, with no accent; but they speak English as a second language, with varying degrees of accent, confidence and command. The continual oscillation between two levels of communication is an apt illustration of one of the play’s central concerns, not to mention a clever way to keep us listening with attention.
English | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus
Even as we get closer to these characters’ world, they are trying to break away from it. “In this room we are not Iranian,” Marjan says. “We are not even on this continent. Today I will ask you to feel any pull you have to your Iranian-ness and let it go.” Only English is permitted within the classroom space, because for Marjan, mastering a language requires letting it master you—allowing yourself to be shaped by its passages of expression. “English is not to be conquered. Embrace it,” she says. “I always liked myself better in English.”
In the scheme of the play, this attitude places her between two of her tutees. She bonds with the easy-going Omid (Hadi Tabbal), whose English is excellent and who stays after class to watch Notting Hill with her; but she butts heads with Elham (a fiery, fuming Tala Ashe), a medical student who struggles with English and resents having to learn it. On the sidelines are the class’s youngest and oldest members: the bubbly Goli (Ava Lalezarzadeh), who is keen on American culture and who, at 18, can absorb new material quickly; and the bluntly superior Roya (Pooya Mohseni), tall and soignée in a Burberry-style headscarf, who plans to move to Canada and live with her assimilationist son, Nader, who has christened himself Nate.
English | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus
In the play’s central role, Neshat offers a moving depiction of a woman who is caught in the crossfire of an internal culture war, without knowing on which side, if any, she belongs. But the other characters—as embodied by the excellent cast, under Adams’s measured and attentive direction—have stories of their own, and sometimes pointed insights to offer. “You’re very smart, Elham, but you’re very rude,” warns Roya in a private moment. “In Farsi, you balance yourself out. But wherever you land, you’re going to have quite a hard time adjusting. Because in English, you won’t have redeeming qualities.”
Toossi’s engrossing game of show and tell takes us inside a foreign culture about which many Americans (including me) are woefully underinformed. But it also gently holds us at a meaningful distance. The very device that permits us to eavesdrop on the characters’ Farsi conversations so comfortably—that allows us to hear them as we hear ourselves—has a core of irony: Translating their words into English lets us understand them, but only through our particular linguistic lens in ways that can never quite capture exactly what they mean. This tension bubbles through English and gently overflows in the play’s final scene. The result is—how you say?—exquisite.
English. Todd Haimes Theatre (Broadway). By Sanaz Toossi. Directed by Knud Adams. With Marjan Neshat, Tala Ashe, Hadi Tabbal, Pooya Mohseni, Ava Lalezarzadeh. Running time: 1hr 40mins. No intermission.
English | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus
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