English, I’m told, is one of the hardest languages to learn. We Americans tend to take it for granted, but with its erratic pronunciations, bizarre contractions and seemingly made-up words, not to mention all the slang, it must be incredibly difficult for foreigners to master our native tongue. And yet for so many people throughout the world, a working knowledge of English is currency to a career, a better life, and even freedom. That’s the backdrop for a group of ESL students studying English in Iran; and as you’d expect, most of them are struggling. Playwright Sanaz Toossi won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for English, a keenly understated work that speaks volumes about the immense impact language has on our culture and identity.
Set in 2008, the entire action takes place in and just outside a generic looking classroom with desks, chairs and a chalkboard. The teacher, Marjan (Marjan Neshat), is an Iranian woman who spent nearly a decade living in the U.K. Her four students are considered advanced but they’re clearly at different levels of proficiency. They’re all hoping to pass the Test of English as a Foreign Language known as TOEFL which is necessary for their various pursuits.
Elham (Tala Ashe) wants to go to medical school in Australia. Goli (Ava Lalezarzadeh), the youngest at 18, knows it will help in her future studies. Roya (Pooya Mohseni) needs to be fluent because her son in Canada has made it a condition of Roya’s visits that she speaks English and not Farsi to her granddaughter. Omid (Hadi Tabbal) is the most proficient of all of them, which creates animosity whenever they play vocabulary games that he usually wins.
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
Toossi uses a clever device to distinguish when the characters are speaking English and Farsi. Their English is halting, accented and slow, often leaving out the articles. But when they break into their native Farsi, they sound comfortably unaccented and fluid. Here is Goli speaking English in show and tell: “This is pencil. Pencil for eyebrow. I want big eyebrow…” And this is how she sounds when speaking Farsi: “I thought it’d be cool for some reason to show everyone how to fill in their brows.” It takes a few minutes to discern the speech patterns but for the most part, there’s no confusion.
There’s obviously much humor in the way the students mangle the pronunciations and mistake the proper words. Elham describes her accented English as “a war crime.” And it’s quite amusing to hear Goli talk about Ricky Martin being “on love” in her attempt to translate his song “She Bangs.”
But Toossi is far more interested in the tradeoffs and sacrifices we experience when steeped in a foreign language. Goli points out that “English does not want to be poetry like Farsi.” And Elham remarks “When I speak English, I know I will always be stranger.” It gets even deeper as Marjan explains “How long can you live in isolation from yourself?” Even after nine years in Manchester, England, she had to come back to her Iranian home, saying she felt like she was disappearing. Omid who was born in the US but moved with his parents back to their homeland in Iran when he was a young teen talks about the sense of disconnection he’s always felt, being able to speak English but not totally fluent with either language, saying all his life, he’s felt like “half a thing.”
Nearly all of the cast members (making their Broadway debuts) are Iranian-American, and their performances are pitch perfect, delivering beautifully nuanced portraits. They returned to the roles after performing in the premiere production at the Atlantic Theater in 2022.
Toossi says she wrote the play in response to Trump’s Muslim travel ban in 2017. She wanted people to understand the challenges immigrants face when they can’t speak properly. The play makes a strong point that language is so inextricably connected to our sense of self that, maybe, as Marjan says, you can really “only speak one language. You can know two but…” And then the thought trails off. That happens quite a bit in the play. Lines are often dropped mid-sentence and it leaves the audience in a bit of a fog, wondering what the characters meant to say. Omid in particular is a mystery as his character is full of contradictions. Perhaps that is the intention, pressing the notion that language can’t be entirely understood without being fully conversant in the native culture.
Toossi writes organically, and as directed by Knud Adams with little fanfare, the work is unflinchingly honest which is to say it resists any effort to pump up the drama. For some, it will feel slow and you might even say the style is an acquired taste. But if you buy into the whole premise… that far more than just words, language must be a lived experience.
The play’s final minutes are spoken by two of the characters in actual Farsi without any English. But just listening to the sounds of the words, the relaxed rhythms of the speech, and sensing the warmth in their expressions, no translation is necessary. For the first time in the play, the characters seem to finally be home.
English opened January 23, 2025, at the Todd Haimes Theatre and runs through March 2. Tickets and information: roundabouttheatre.org
