If you’ve ever attempted to learn a foreign language in a classroom setting, you know that the process can be frustrating, repetitious and often tedious.
Sanaz Toosi’s play English, now receiving its world premiere at Atlantic Theater Company, conveys that experience all too well.
Set in Karaj, Iran in 2008, the play depicts the efforts of four adult Iranians — three women and one man, ranging in age from 18 to 54 — to study for TOEFL, or Test of English as a Foreign Language, under the tutelage of their instructor Marjan (Marjan Heshat), who spent several years living in England. As they go through their various exercises, which include throwing a ball to each other while shouting out English words for things that are green or that you find in a kitchen, we gradually learn small details about their lives, motivations and feelings about learning a new language.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
But not enough. The play remains stubbornly undramatic, lacking any narrative propulsion and sadly bereft of the details that would make the characters or situations interesting. Eventually, a few small plot strands emerge: a mild flirtation between Marjan and a significantly younger male student, Omid (Hadi Tabbal), who already seems to speak English surprisingly well; another student’s (Tala Ashe) inability to lessen her very strong accent, which prompts Omid to condescendingly refer to her as “Borat”; and the fruitless efforts of the oldest student in the class, Roya (Pooya Mogseni), to connect with her grown son living in America who seems to be ignoring her frequent phone calls.
The young Iranian-American playwright (who also has another play, Wish You Were Here, premiering in April at Playwrights Horizons) seems to be interested in exploring how language affects our cultural identities. But even that promising theme feels barely addressed, and the jokes about such things as cinematic romantic comedies starring Julia Roberts prove mildly amusing at best. Cheap laughs involving the students’ verbal mistakes abound. Every once in a while, there’s a resonant line of dialogue, as when one of the students comments that “English does not want to be poetry, like Farsi,” but then another rote teaching exercise begins and one’s interest quickly wanes.
It doesn’t help that the dialogue, almost all actually spoken in English, alternates between English and Farsi, making it sometimes hard to tell whether the characters are speaking in their native language or the one they’re trying to learn (when speaking English, their accents disappear). And that’s when you can make the lines out; despite the theater’s intimacy, the soft-spoken performers frequently fail to make themselves heard.
Director Knud Adams has staged the piece for minimum impact, making the production’s glacially paced, 105 intermissionless minutes feel much longer. Then there’s the strange design choice of an utterly unnecessary revolving set, complete with pillars, guaranteeing that at some point nearly everyone in the audience will have a partially obstructed view. Presumably this was intended to provide different views of the actors, but it would have been much simpler, not to mention cheaper, if they had simply moved seats once in a while.
Other than the aforementioned vocal projection problems, the performers are not to be faulted. They make the most of their thinly drawn characters, with Tabbal delivering a charming performance as the male student harboring secrets and Neshat affecting as the teacher who finds herself questioning her values. But their efforts are not enough to prevent you from desperately wanting to cut this class.
English opened February 22, 2022 at the Linda Gross Theater and runs through March 20. Tickets and information: atlantictheater.org
