
With the United States now governed by swaggering, ignorant bigots spewing xenophobic venom, militarizing the border, and terrorizing any insufficiently White person hoping to come or stay, a gentle and subtle play about people simply trying to learn English, in a U.S.-adversary country, is almost automatically a breath of fresh air. It feels like a balm, if only because all nuanced portraiture of the multitudinous humans now being indiscriminately spurned and scapegoated helps counteract the hatred.
If that sounds like as much of a hedge as a compliment, I guess it is. I missed Sanaz Toosi’s play English when it premiered at the Atlantic Theater in 2022, after which it won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. Seeing it now for the first time in the Roundabout’s Broadway remount of Knud Adams’s serenely measured Atlantic production, I feel its quiet power and appreciate its thoughtful exploration of the wrenching dislocations of self that can accompany second language-learning in adulthood. That said, I’ll also confess that I’m a little surprised at this play’s limited scope. Major accolades inflate expectations, create anticipointment, as my wife would say.
Toossi is an Iranian-American, born in the U.S. and raised speaking both Farsi and English. The play English began as her MFA thesis at NYU during the first Trump administration—an appalled reaction, she says, to the Muslim ban. It follows four ordinary Iranians, three women and a man, taking an advanced conversational English class in Karaj, Iran, over several months in 2008. They have different motivations, some left unexplained, and the motivation of their teacher Marjan (Marjan Neshat), a married woman in her 40s who spent nine years in Manchester, hovers as its own mystery. Marjan’s enthusiasm for English is evident, as is her empathy with those trying to prepare themselves to leave Iran, but she never explains why she returned.
The class’ primary purpose is to prepare students for the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language), required as proof of proficiency by foreign schools and employers, but the play is really about the effect that speaking English has on its characters. In a series of short scenes so centered on simple language exercises they can easily seem inconsequential, we see, for example, that English makes 28-year-old Elham (Tala Ashe) irritated and aggressive. She is a medical student whose matriculation to an Australian school hangs on the TOEFL, and her language frustrations exacerbate her hyper-competitiveness. It’s impossible to tell which she loathes more: the language or herself when speaking it. Eighteen-year-old Goli (Ava Lalezarzadeh), by contrast, feels no such pressure. She’s just there to keep her foreign options open, and being sweeter and more easygoing than Elham in the first place, she can enjoy English and consequently learns faster.

The cast is first-rate and these conflicts are very clearly and movingly drawn. Crucial to the play is that the actors work not only with their usual tools but also with a convention established at the outset whereby they use accented English when understood to be speaking English, and use fluent, unaccented English when understood to be speaking Farsi. This device is effective, if not entirely original (it’s a variation on Brian Friel’s famous innovation in his 1980 play Translations). The vocal contrasts, which alternate verbal struggle and verbal comfort, amplify personality traits and sharpen character conflicts. And not all the accents are the same.
Roya, for instance, the class’ oldest student, who plans to join her son and his family in Canada, conveys pride in her progress with multiple thickly accented voicemail messages left on his phone. She’s in the class because the son has told her he doesn’t want her speaking Farsi to his daughter. When it finally dawns on her that he is not responding, possibly ghosting her, she uses the same accent to confront him: “Claire is . . . Why you give my grand-daughter name I cannot say? Families aren’t meant to live this way.” That is deeply poignant. At one point, she very smoothly reads one of the son’s equivocating voicemails to the class—left in Farsi—and the impending family heartbreak is crushing.
Omid (Hadi Tabbal), the sole man in the class, is curiously fluent in English and turns out to have been dishonest about why. Until that reveal, though, his very mild accent animates a flirtation with Marjan, and that feels for a time like the thrust of the plot. The electricity between the actors, Neshat and Tabbal, is strong, their scenes truly touching. The trouble with centering this non-affair, though, is that these actors’ accents for “English” and “Farsi” are barely distinguishable, so the play’s featured language device feels like it has little to do with them.
English has been rightly praised for its cleverly oblique storytelling and concentration on the inner, individual experience of emigration and expatriation rather than, as usual, their macro-political dimensions. Nevertheless, I found the complete absence of social and political context in the work frustrating and confining.

The women, for instance, enjoy and discuss pop music with explicitly sexy lyrics, dress in jeans and sneakers like Westerners, and wear their scarves so far back on their heads they look barely covered. Is there no fear of the Ayatollahs and their morality police in this world at all? Yes, I get that the classroom—splendidly designed by Marsha Ginsberg as a spare cube floating and rotating in a black void—is not a public place. But the play turns on anxiety about leaving Iran and its culture behind. How can that be entirely divorced from fear and politics? Avoiding those subjects completely makes the character stories feel thin.
Brian Friel, interestingly enough, was also intent on keeping his local Irish village tale brighter than its political background in Translations. He used his language convention—whereby his actors all spoke English but some characters were understood to speak Irish, Greek and Latin—mostly for humor and setting up character disconnections and misunderstandings important to the plot. Nevertheless, the weight of British Imperialism lingers over that play’s action the whole time (English soldier-cartographers are Anglicizing Irish place names) and gives the local story a gravity it wouldn’t otherwise have.
Another extraordinary play that English brings to mind is more recent: Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation (2009). It happens that Baker’s play also tracks ordinary people in a class over many weeks, and it’s also structured as a series of short scenes centered on practical teaching exercises. Baker uses no foreign language device and her play isn’t about displacement. Both plays nevertheless proceed obliquely in the same manner, and similarly employ the progress of a humble class to frame quietly momentous life transitions in their characters. This similarity does credit to Toossi. Very few plays may be meaningfully compared to Baker’s. The echo is yet another reason why, at least for me, the arrival of English in this brutal winter feels like a balm.
By Sanas Toossi
Directed by Knud Adams
Todd Haimes Theatre
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