“Sometimes I think you can only speak one language,” says a character in Sanaz Toossi’s English. “You can know two, but…” She trails off, her brows knitted and her eyes far away, leaving something unexpressed in words but plenty articulate in the reverberant air. It’s an especially poignant moment in a play that’s full of them while still maintaining its essential lightness. English doesn’t sink toward soppiness; it — you can perhaps imagine a gesture here. It’s the gesture that another of the play’s characters makes when trying to describe how English as a language feels to her, how it’s different from her native tongue, Farsi: She pauses, then hovers her hand palm-down, undulating it in easy waves, the way you do when you’re sitting in the front seat of a car with the window down and your arm out in the summer breeze. It’s a floating, gliding gesture. “English does not want to be poetry like Farsi,” says this young woman, named Goli (Ava Lalezarzadeh), searching for the words to explain. “It is like some rice. English is the rice. You take some rice and you make the rice whatever you want.”
Whether this ability to transform—both to mutate itself and to promise transformation and, thereby, opportunity to its speaker—is a gift of the English language or a reminder of its use as a tool of empire-building and cultural oppression is the uneasy question at the heart of Toossi’s delicately wrought play. Its premiere three years ago at the Atlantic Theater Company won Toossi the 2023 Pulitzer for Drama. Now that production, with director Knud Adams and the whole of the original cast and design team, arrives on Broadway like a welcome guest, a hopeful presence in a moment that feels like a particularly dismal party. There’s our own national crisis, our harrowing shift back toward a reigning ethos of bigotry and oligarchic greed, along with the heavy knowledge that the women of English—set in Iran in 2008—are walking toward a future that contains, among so many deaths, that of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the morality police. There’s also the reality of our theatrical present, in which both of the Atlantic’s winter productions have been cancelled owing to a strike at the theater by the stagehands union, IATSE. As heels get dug in on opposite sides of a war over money that doesn’t actually exist, the collateral damage is still, and always, the art and the artists.
In such a climate, there’s something extra-bracing about seeing Toossi’s play—sensitive, funny, and intimate, powered by its own craft and its excellent ensemble rather than by a shiny name on the marquee—flex its muscles uptown. Its story is simple: In a classroom in the Iranian city of Karaj, four adult students are studying for the TOEFL exam, the Test of English as a Foreign Language. Their teacher, Marjan (Marjan Neshat), is buoyant and elegant, a true believer. Speaking English, she tells her students, is “one of the greatest things two people can do together.” Inside the graceful rotating cube of Marsha Ginsberg’s set—which provides several views of the spare, sunlit classroom, along with a glimpse of the building’s exterior—Marjan’s whiteboard is inscribed with two underlined words: English Only. Eventually, in a fraught moment with her students, she’ll push this directive to precarious extremes: “If you are here to learn English,” she says to them, “I am going to ask you to agree that here, in this room, we are not Iranian. 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. Keep it outside the wall of this classroom.”
Easier said. As Toossi presents snapshots of the six weeks Marjan and her students spend together, tensions mount and hearts are exposed, both inside the classroom and out. Roya (the regal Pooya Mohseni)—a well-off grandmother learning English at the urging of her son in order to be able to speak with her granddaughter, who’s being raised with no Farsi in Canada—starts to waver in her sense that she’s still a part of her own family, or that they, striving to assimilate, retain any connection to their ancestral home. Omid (Hadi Tabbal), the only man in Marjan’s class, annoys his classmates with his already advanced English (“Have you heard this before or something?” snaps one of them as they struggle through a listening comprehension exercise where Omid supplies all the answers). He also hides secrets and nurtures a quiet crush on his teacher, and she on him. He’s the only one who ever shows up for Marjan’s office hours, in which she plays movies like Notting Hill and Moonstruck. (“Why did you go there?” he asks Marjan, who returned to Iran after living in England for nine years. “Hugh Grant,” she replies. “Why did you come back?” he says, and she gives a resigned half-smile: “He wasn’t there.”) Meanwhile, the smart, stubborn Elham (Tala Ashe, barbed and excellent) attacks English as if she’s in a rage room, smashing up old appliances with a sledgehammer. “No one hates this language more than I hate,” she says bluntly, with an accent that has prompted Omid, in a moment of stress and atypical cruelty, to call her Borat.
In constructing the central conceit of her play, Toossi is careful to designate each character’s accent: When teacher and students are speaking English, their accents are audible, from Elham’s heavier, less assured speech to Marjan and Omid’s relative speed and fluidity. When they speak Farsi, they, as actors, are still speaking English, but the accents fall away and they blaze and tumble through casual conversation, a whole range of musicality, nuance, and expression restored to them. In English, they might be reduced to naming things that are green or asking each other their favorite colors. In Farsi, they can gossip, dream, complain, wonder, worry, and imply. And while Marjan promises them that one day, the same natural miracles, the same ease and spaciousness, await them in English, there’s doubt flickering in everyone’s eyes — even hers.
English isn’t the only play to employ this particular language trick, but Toossi’s handling of it is especially thoughtful. It can be, and often is, employed for comedic effect — to wit: “This woman has enormous teeth,” Omid observes, in his accented English, about Julia Roberts. “You only find teeth like this in the west … They could rip through wire. In a good way.” But Toossi’s characters are also acutely aware that it’s not simply their fluency but the way they sound that determines how and where they can navigate the world. Though the American theater in which their story is playing out is full of laughter, laughter is also dangerous for them — a sting and a threat. “Goli,” says Elham, always brutally blunt in English, “people hear your accent and they go oh my god it is so funny you are so stupid.” Only later will we discover that Elham hears herself in exactly the same way: “I am not an idiot and also I am nice,” she bursts out in frustration. “And also I am care-y. I care about the world and and … I am nice.” Her protest points to an Elham that we only catch in glimpses, a whole person swimming underneath the ice sheet of this unavoidable, “universal” language, the language of opportunity, the language of gatekeepers. “I like Elham when she speaks Farsi,” says Elham eventually to Marjan, and it jolts us back to a question Omid asked his teacher, a hard question, posed in Farsi: “Why do you only like me in English? Why do you only — like everything in English?” The answer is painful and palpable, though it may not exist in words, no matter the language.
English is at the Todd Haimes Theatre through March 2.