‘English’: The Broadway Play Everyone Needs to See Right Now

Few are the standout gems—those plays that conquer an audience so wholly you feel a delicious two-way crackle in the room as a performance progresses. Sanaz Toossi’s English, which opened tonight on Broadway at the Todd Haimes Theatre (to March 2) in a co-production with the Roundabout Theatre Company, is one such gem.

After its first staging off-Broadway at the (now strike-hit) Atlantic Theater in February 2022, it won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and its cast an array of awards and nominations.

This critic’s advice is as simple as it was in 2022. Book a ticket right now—an exquisitely written, beautifully acted and mounted one hour and forty-five minutes of theater awaits. At this moment, with immigration—and attacks on immigrants’ rights—at the top of President Trump’s agenda, the play assumes a new, urgent precision.

English, directed by Knud Adams, is both a comedy about five Iranians learning English in a school classroom in Karaj, Iran, in 2008, and a drama of five clashing personalities—interrogating how notions of language, identity, and home intersect. Is learning English an important way to expand a world and its horizons, or is it diminishing, clouding, a nod to Western cultural hegemony, even a trap?

On the whiteboard of the classroom in English, fortysomething teacher Marjan (Marjan Neshat) has written the title of the course down: “TOEFL: Test of English as a Foreign Language,” underlining the guiding instruction for any discussion within the class: “English Only.”

Marsha Ginsberg’s design is a rotating square containing the classroom that we come to see from different angles, as well as a basic exterior porch, for smoking and gossip purposes. Reza Behjat’s lighting is just as simple and effective, somehow conveying the blazing midday heat, and softer, golden light of the end of a day.

But where Ginsberg’s design was perfect in the confines of the Atlantic, the production team have misjudged its dimensions in the larger space. For one, the audience in the orchestra is now facing upwards to a raised-plinth stage. From my seat in the orchestra—depending on where the stage rotated to—characters were frequently obscured by the too-large hulks of chairs and desks, and even a vertical plane of wall.

This act of design self-sabotage doesn’t detract from the brilliance of the play and cast. Of the pupils, Elham (Tala Ashe, whose spikiness gives the play a welcome motor), in her late twenties, wants to study gastroenterology in Australia. This is her fifth attempt at such a class, and she wants to ace it to become a teaching assistant to help earn money in her quest to leave the country. However, Elham is not only tired of the failed attempts, but questioning what the objective of the class is.

The imperious Roya (Pooya Mohseni), in her mid-fifties, has a son living in Canada with a Western wife; Roya wants to master English so she can speak to her grandchild.

Handsome and languid Omid (Hadi Tabbal) is the only man in the class, and one whose command of English far outstrips his classmates’. He and the encouraging-and-also sharp Marjan gravitate to one another, an attraction that is partly rooted in their experience of enjoying speaking English, and of somehow beached between two worlds. Goli (Ava Lalezarzadeh) is just 18, and someone seemingly unburdened with the big questions and cultural vexations the class elicits in others. She just wants to learn and enjoys doing so. (Her halting-English analysis of Ricky Martin’s “She Bangs” is hilarious.)

For a play with language at its heart, English works in a number of smart registers. Sometimes it locates its (extremely clever and laugh–out-loud) humor or seriousness in the space between the words the students use, and the correct English they are straining to master. Everyone except Omid’s English is halting; but when they break into Farsi—for which Marjan keeps a forbidding score-tally on the whiteboard—the actors’ convey their fluency, and relief to be fluent, by speaking in a smooth American-English argot.

The classes are made up of stilted conversations about their lives, games in which an object is thrown from one character to another as they come up with words for things that are green, or items of clothing, or things you find in a classroom. They listen to tapes of American voices discussing basketball games and wedding plans and are then asked questions to test their comprehension.

Watching a Julia Roberts film with Marjan, Omid notes in a wonderstruck voice how huge her teeth are. “They could rip through wire. In a good way.” Marjan, queen of the double meaning, says “Sometimes understanding Hugh Grant takes two people,” and later—in the play’s best line—rises to turn the DVD player off as Grant and Roberts are left in blissful love at the end of Notting Hill.

“Good for them,” Marjan says. She does not say this snidely, or her portrayer for an easy laugh. She says it so evenly that it is only later you realize we, the audience, with our sudden gale of laughter, have helped make the moment.

When Marjan asks why we learn a language, the answers vary from need (asking for food) to expressing emotion. Elham says how they speak in this particular class is “unnatural,” and immediately asks Omid why he’s there as he’s already so proficient. Elham says that it doesn’t matter what English the class learns or doesn’t learn; the Western world will judge their residual Iranian accents as funny, stupid, and worse.

Marjan, who lived in the U.K.—in the northern English city of Manchester—admits for those nine years she was called “Mary,” even though she said she liked it. “Marjan is not hard to say,” says Elham. “Our mothers get to name us. Not foreigners,” says Roya.

Marjan persists, sensing her pupils’ frustration at inviting “a foreign language into your body,” but she asks that in this classroom “we are not Iranian.” She wants them during the classes to “let go” of their Iranian-ness, but Neshat also shows Marjan herself losing and questioning her own certainties and authority.

We see Roya trying to call her son, and not only stumbling over words, but over the distance—geographical and emotional—those stumbling words have come to emblemize. She refuses to play along in a show-and-tell, defiantly bringing traditional Iranian music into class. “This is my song,” she says, sitting ramrod straight in her chair.

Roya says Elham is so obnoxious personally in an English context she will have “no redeeming qualities.” This may be true, but Ashe adeptly makes all of Elham’s jagged edges—and there are many—totally understandable. Indeed, we cheer for her when she finally beats know-it-all Omid in a game of “Things you find in a kitchen.”

Marjan feels English and Farsi are at war in her head. Omid thinks it’s a “sort of miracle” to belong anywhere.

A final discussion between Marjan and Elham is also about language. “No one hates this language more than I hate,” Elham says of English. “I like my native tongue.” A climactic dance around language shared by the women comprises the play’s most surprising moment—leaving a predominantly English-speaking audience grasping for understanding in the best possible way.