When Sanaz Toossi made her Off-Broadway debut with this play about four adult students in Iran taking a class to learn English, even the many who praised it described “English” as “contemplative,” or “oblique,” or (as I did) sharply observed if slow-moving. 

A year later it was called “quietly powerful” by the judges who awarded “English” the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Drama, just the most publicized of the many awards it received.

Those awards, and the move now to Broadway, where it’s opening tonight at Roundabout’s Todd Haimes Theater, puts the pressure of heightened expectations on “English.” And, although only three years have passed,  we arguably have entered a new era, politically and culturally. The result is that “English,”  transferring essentially intact — including the same first-rate cast (all now making their Broadway debuts) – plays differently for me.  It’s still a lovely, low-key comedy about learning a second language. It just doesn’t feel as deep as it did in 2022.  There is too much left unexplained, too much unsaid. 

“English” is essentially a series of short scenes presenting the  English lessons in a  six-week course in a storefront school in Karaj, a large suburb of Tehran, Iran, taught by Marjan (Marjan Neshat) in 2008.

Toossi cleverly solves the problem of how to dramatize the often-comic struggles of students learning English in a way that’s intelligible to an English-speaking audience. Modifying a technique  that Qui Nguyen pioneered in “Vietgone” she has the actors speaking in fluent, colloquial English when the characters are supposed to be speaking their native tongue of Farsi. When the characters are attempting to speak in English, the actors’ English is now halting and heavily accented. 

We’re told from the get-go that the course is suppose to prepare the students for the TOEFL exam ( “Test of English as a Foreign Language.”)  But only one of the four students has an explicit reason to take the exam, which universities in English-speaking countries use as part of their admission process for foreign students.  Elham (Tala Ashe) wants to go to medical school in Australia. Now in her late 20s,she’s failed the TOEFL exam five times. “My accent is a war crime,” she says. “Every day in here I feel like idiot. And I want everyone to know I am not idiot.”
“I am not an idiot,” Marjan corrects her grammar, which is typical of the linguistic-based humor in the play.
It’s not clear that any of the other three are even planning to take the test.

 Goli (Ava Lalezarzadeh), a cheerful teenager, seems simply to like the language. “English does not want to be poetry like Farsi,” she says.

 Roya (Pooya Mohseni), a grandmother in her 50s, wants to move in with her son in “the Canada,”  but, as she tells her classmates, he insists that she learn English first, because he doesn’t want her to speak Farsi to her granddaughter, presumably because it will hinder her assimilation. 

Omid (Hadi Tabbal) is in class, he tells the others, to prepare for an interview at the American consulate for a green card. He speaks English so much better than anybody else (including the teacher) that it becomes a great source of humor in the play.  During the occasional lightning-quick games the teacher creates to challenge her students to come up with English vocabulary on a specific subject,  Omid’s abstruse choices hilariously baffle and irritate his classmates: Things you find in a kitchen (“spatula”), things you find in a classroom (“white-out”), items of clothing (“windbreaker.”)

If Omid’s presence enlivens the interaction among the students, he also heats up scenes with the teacher, with a not especially subtle suggestion of a potential romance when he and Marjan start watching Hollywood rom-coms together by themselves in the classroom during office hours (we see the opening credits of a Julia Roberts movie, and Cher in Moonstruck, up to the point where anybody starts talking.)  

So, it’s clear dramaturgically why Omid exists in the play. But it becomes baffling why the character has signed up for the class in the first place. I won’t spoil what happens or what we learn, other than to say Omid’s trajectory feels like an obvious misstep.

Roya’s trajectory is also instructive. As the play unfolds, we realize that her son Nader (who now calls himself Nate) may only want her to visit his family – and perhaps not even that. Roya disappears about halfway through the play; we figure out that’s because she no longer sees a reason to learn English.

Before she leaves, she explodes, insisting that the class listen to a song in Farsi, and saying in Farsi: “We should remember that we come from this. And our voluntary migration from this is something we should be grieving.”

I thought when I heard that in 2022 that it spoke volumes. Now I think: But maybe not loudly enough.

.The Roundabout presents a page on its website about what was happening in Iran in 2008. The country was “on the brink,” with increased political repression and economic turmoil. 

We see the four women characters wearing head coverings (as mandated by Sharia law of the Islamic Republic of Iran), but Roya’s comment is the only allusion – and an elusive one – to the context with which these characters want to learn English: They are doing so in a country where, even in 2024, the new president was sworn in with chants of “Death to America.”  It was a choice to keep out of the play any clear references to what was happening in Iran politically, or even to any explicit sense that the characters were being affected by it.

Perhaps Toossi – a California-born daughter of immigrants from Iran – is telling us indirectly that the characters are actively tuning out the political upheaval in Iran in 2008 (as so many Americans are saying these days they plan to tune out the political upheaval in the U.S. in 2025.) Even if this absence does reflect the everyday experience of some Iranians in 2008, surely not all.

Marsha Ginsberg’s set of the classroom rotates – sometimes we see the outside wall of the school, sometimes one side of the classroom, sometimes the other – which gives the audience different visual perspectives, and the hint that we are getting the different characters’ perspectives. It 

feels like a missed opportunity that the perspectives  are so relatively uniform.

It didn’t feel that way in 2022. Perhaps some of the difference is that, when “English” debuted Off-Broadway, its muted quality felt like a welcome contrast to the stridently political tone of so much of the theater that had emerged after the end of the pandemic lockdown and the protests sparked by the George Floyd murder.

 There remains some value in a quiet, contemplative play, even one with some loose threads. “English” goes inward, and there can be beauty in that. “When I speak English, I know I will always be stranger,” Elham says to her teacher. “But I am hearing myself….I hear my home.”

English
Todd Haimes Theater through March 2, 2025
Running time: 100 minutes no intermission
Tickets: $58 – $298
Written by Sanaz Toossi
Directed by Knud Adams
Scenic design by Marsha Ginsberg, costume design by Enver Chakartash, lighting design by Reza Behjat, sound design by Sinan Refik Zafar
Cast: Tala Ashe as Elham, Ava Lalezarzadeh as Goli, Pooya Mohseni as Roya, Marjan Neshat as Marjan the teacher, Hadi Tabbal as Omid.

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