Sanaz Toossi’s “English” Comes to Broadway

Sanaz Toossi began writing “English,” her Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, now at the Roundabout’s Todd Haimes Theatre, as her graduate-school thesis. The play, a portrait of an English-language class in Iran, was, she has said, her furious reaction to the “Muslim ban”—as Donald Trump’s executive order from 2017 was known—enacted as she was pursuing an M.F.A. at N.Y.U. Toossi has described “English” as her “scream into the void.” The actual show, then, is a surprise: a gentle, subtle experience that calibrates our ears to shifts in pedagogy and understanding.

“English” débuted at the Atlantic, in a co-production with the Roundabout, in 2022. It’s primarily a schoolroom comedy, directed then as now by Knud Adams with an eye to wry wistfulness. The show tracks an advanced English course, in the city of Karaj, Iran, in 2008, where four adult students try to master new vocabulary (“Things you find in a kitchen. Go!”) and the very un-Persian sound of the letter “W.” When the characters speak in English, they adopt a heavy accent; when they are meant to be conversing in Farsi, they use accentless English, as swift as unobstructed thought. “My accent is a war crime!” one frustrated student complains. It lands as a joke, but it hints at currents of culture and empire.

The Atlantic production remains essentially unchanged, and the cast, too, has come to Broadway. The teacher, Marjan (Marjan Neshat), is focussed on the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language), but her students’ goals vary: the frequently petulant Elham (Tala Ashe) wants to attend medical school in Australia; the teen-age Goli (Ava Lalezarzadeh) is taking the test to keep her college options open; Roya (Pooya Mohseni) might be moving to Canada; and the lone male student, the nearly fluent Omid (Hadi Tabbal), says he has an American green-card interview. The porousness of Iran’s borders is a given, and everyone oscillates, caught in a limbo between leaving and staying. Marjan exudes a certain sorrowful mystery, which is to say glamour—we learn that she lived joyfully in the U.K. for nine years, yet, for some inexpressible reason, she came back.

Omid, whose motivations rarely make sense, is drawn to Marjan, lingering during her office hours to watch English-language romantic comedies, such as an old VHS tape she has of “Notting Hill.” The unlikely pair’s connection pulses along with the movie’s soaring final track, by Elvis Costello. “She may be the song that summer sings,” Costello bellows. (Good luck to anyone learning syntax from that.) Lyrical absurdity also shapes the play’s most precise comic scene. Goli stumbles into poetry even as she claims that she likes English for its unpoetic qualities. She has brought in a Ricky Martin CD for show-and-tell. “She bangs, she bangs!” Ricky sings from a little boom box, as shy excitement flits across Goli’s face. Then she explains:

A bang is a [Goli demonstrates banging].
But more than that:
A bang is pots and pans inside the head.
It is a crash. A fender bender? . . .
Inside the heart.
A bang is how the universe is created.
That is how she bangs.

The handsome classroom set, designed by Marsha Ginsberg, sits inside a huge rotating framework box, lit by Reza Behjat to seem to float in a black void. Of course, the dark space around the set isn’t actually a void. It’s our shared atmosphere. Seeing a play written in response to Trump’s first Administration at the outset of his second feels surreal. But Toossi keeps her political commentary oblique by showing us a casual, everyday Iran rarely seen in the West. The women do not adjust their loosely worn veils when they head outside, for instance. Is this defiance or nonchalance? Toossi lets us wonder. Her interest lies in a more universal question: the way half-learned languages can rub against one another, sometimes erasing aspects—compassion, graciousness, humor—of the person using them.

Toossi herself speaks both Farsi (her parents were born in Iran) and English (she was born in California), and several characters meditate on the internal displacements of bilingualism. For all the precise realism of the play’s setting and dialogue, Toossi seems to be writing allegorically about a wider experience, perhaps one familiar to her, of the immigrant’s double consciousness. The students might represent different aspects of a quarrelling inner self. For Roya, English smashes and colonizes; for Marjan, it seduces and abandons. “I always liked myself better in English,” Marjan says, but the way she says it—dreamily, nostalgically—sounds like a woman grieving.

If you want to see a play that grapples more overtly with the politics of life in Iran, Amir Reza Koohestani’s Farsi-language “Blind Runner,” by the Paris-based Mehr Theatre Group, is finishing an engagement at St. Ann’s Warehouse, as part of the Under the Radar festival. As video projectors feed grainy images onto dark walls, a jailed Tehrani woman (Ainaz Azarhoush) encourages her husband (Mohammad Reza Hosseinzadeh) to help a woman who has been blinded at a protest. “I don’t need to wear a uniform, or cover my hair for you to believe that I’m in prison,” Azarhoush tells the camera. “Just imagine it,” the supertitles instruct us. I realized that Koohestani’s admonition hadn’t quite left me when I saw “English” several days later. Even the show’s breeziness felt subtly frightening. Goli talks about Facebook—I kept hoping she wouldn’t post.

After attending “English,” trying to work out why I was frustrated by some of its plot twists and character opacities, I reread “Wish You Were Here,” Toossi’s second play to première in 2022, written long after “English” but produced only a month later at Playwrights Horizons. In that more finely grained drama, a group of female friends in Karaj chat their way through the decades: revolution, the Iran-Iraq War, the reopening of the universities, religious encroachments. The friends’ raucous intimacy—in many scenes, a woman is either painting another’s toenails or waxing her legs—dissolves as most of the women leave the country. Neshat again played the main character, Nazanin, who comes across as a little mean and quite lost. I was reminded of how brilliantly Toossi can write for people who don’t understand their own motivations, and how Neshat blossoms when her characters have something specific to conceal. In “English,” too, there are inchoate impulses, but Toossi seems to exert less control over them. In the gorgeous “Wish,” the playwright demonstrates far more comfort with elision and, ironically, with the unspoken.

I was thinking about languages and the inner gears of learning them as I sifted through a box of documents in another Under the Radar show, two days after seeing “English.” The Lebanese artist Tania El Khoury and her husband, Ziad Abu-Rish, a historian, staged a combined installation/performance at the Brooklyn arts space Invisible Dog called “The Search for Power,” about electricity outages in Lebanon. (Even before the recent Israeli bombardments, rationing could leave some areas in the country without power twenty-three hours a day.) After one such outage, at their wedding, El Khoury and Abu-Rish took a vow to get to the bottom of the seemingly intractable problem. Over several years, they pursued the mystery, tracking down answers in archives in Brussels, Paris, Washington, and Beirut.

If you attended the installation version of the show, during the day, you were given a pair of headphones and ushered to a long table, laden with a wedding’s worth of nuts and apricots, with a document box at each place setting. Through our headphones, we heard the couple’s account of their research. At their direction, we read Xeroxes of letters, in French, on Hotel St. George stationery, looked at photostats of American redevelopment plans from the nineteen-fifties, and held slippery film reprints of Iranian newspapers. I felt a little like a student again myself, sitting there with my big wireless headphones and bending my head down toward my work. The answers, as the artists traced the beleaguered Lebanese electricity authority’s troubles back more than a century, always had to do with graft and transnational exploitation. Thank goodness the researchers are comfortable in so many languages, I thought, or those secrets would have stayed locked away. ♦