Our relationship with language is the subject of Sanaz Toossi’s perceptive new play English, presented in a taut and affecting production by Knud Adams in a co-production from Atlantic Theater Company and Roundabout Theater Company. It’s so refreshing to hear from a new voice and gain perspective outside the American kitchen sink.
Set in a English language classroom in 2008 Iran, this funny and moving work follows four adult students and their teacher as they prepare for the all-important TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language). A high score can mean the difference between menial work and better job opportunities and possibly moving to the West.
Each character has a different attitude toward their subject, and Toossi subtly delineates their conflicts and interactions with each other. The flinty Elham (a bracingly rough-edged Tala Ashe) hates having to speak English with a passion. She feels it represses her personality and culture, but she knows she must learn it for a better life. The softer Goli (attractive and bubbly Ava Lalezarzadeh) is open to the new language but struggles with its intricacies. Matronly Roya (dryly funny Pooya Mohseni) only wants to acquire the new tongue so she can communicate with her granddaughter in Canada and eventually move there with her son and daughter-in-law. Proficient Omid (confident yet complex Hadi Tabbal) speaks like a native American and is hiding his real motivations for taking the course.
These might include his attraction to the teacher Marjan (wonderfully conflicted Marjan Neshat) who disdains her native Farsi and Iranian way of life. But she is ambivalent about English as well, having lived in Manchester, England for many years and returned to Iran because she felt out of place.
Through these five differing lenses, Toossi makes sharp and penetrating observations on how language shapes one’s attitude to self-worth, environment, and society. The students shake their teacher’s beliefs that English is superior to Farsi by asserting their love of their native tongue. Marjan pushes back, questioning her life choices. Aided by Marsha Ginsberg’s evocative and spare revolving set, Adams’s direction distills the conflicts and struggles of the learners and their instructor. In addition to conveying these shifting viewpoints and passions, the cast skillfully indicates when they are speaking in English and in Farsi though almost all the dialogue is in English (There is a shift between the casual naturalness of speaking in their mother tongue and the stiff formal vocalizing of the foreign language.)
The only time the characters speak in Farsi is the final scene between Elham and Marjab but thanks to crystal-clear intentions and choices of Ashe and Nehsat, we understand exactly when is being said.
