3Views sent us–May, Maia, and Maddie–to Sanaz Toossi’s English. The following represents excerpts from our conversation on the power this play holds for us. Please note that we talk through the play in its entirety. We’d recommend you see the play first (run, don’t walk!) before reading this if you want to avoid spoilers.
May: My name is May Treuhaft-Ali. I am an Egyptian-American playwright and dramaturg. My parents chose not to teach me Arabic, as many Arab parents did in the immediate post-9/11 era in which I grew up. I have tried multiple times to learn it as an adult, and it is still something I want to do. The places where I’ve most meaningfully connected with my heritage have actually been within the theater community, like Noor Theatre and the SWANA Writers’ Co-op. Through those spaces, I've also been really grateful to learn so much about Persian culture. It's been a real gift for me to be in community with so many Iranian-American artists and witness how meaningful English has been for them.
Maia: My name is Maia Safani and I’m a producer and arts administrator. I’m half Iranian. I didn’t grow up speaking Farsi but have tried to learn as an adult. It’s been very difficult, not only because the language is so different from English but also because there are limited opportunities for Farsi language learning in the States.
Maddie: And I'm Maddie Rostami, though for this intro, I’ll share my full name: Madeleine Roya Rostami. I’m an arts educator and dramaturg, and I am also half Iranian–my dad was born and raised in Iran. My parents also chose not to teach me Farsi in post-9/11 America. I’m slowly starting to learn Farsi as an adult. Before we get too far into a discussion about language and identity and art, we’d love to give a brief overview of Sanaz Toossi’s remarkable play.
English tells the story of four students in Iran–Goli (Ava Lalezarzadeh), Roya (Pooya Mohseni), Omid (Hadi Tabbal), and Elham (Tala Ashe)–as they prepare to take the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language). Under the instruction of Marjan (Marjan Neshat), their teacher, they are instructed to speak only English over the six weeks of class. But learning a new language can be painfully hard, and they sometimes break this rule, a distinction we hear through their speech. When they’re speaking English, we hear a jolted Iranian accent and imperfectly placed articles. When they break into Farsi, they still speak “English” for the audience, but it’s balanced and poetic, rolling off the tongue.
Maia: It's hard to talk about a show that I have such a deep emotional tie to. Sanaz is the first Iranian American playwright whose work I’ve been able to see staged, and getting to witness this play debut on Broadway is such a gift. English has made me interrogate how much I take for granted when it comes to the role of language in identity formation. I’m still reflecting on my relationships with the folks in my life who speak English as a second language and the parts of them I haven’t been able to fully experience because we’re limited to English.
May: Roya has this beautiful moment where she plays a voicemail from her son in English and another one in Farsi, and she says: “Do you hear how much more soft he is in his mother tongue?” The play points out so beautifully that it can be hard to move beyond a first impression of someone and pick up on the secondary and tertiary tones of their personality when they’re speaking a second language. But by the same token, Marjan talks about how you lose so much of yourself when you exist in another language that you start to forget that you're adventurous and optimistic and kind. Because you don't see it reflected back to you, you forget that you are that way. But if you can hold on and push through that period, which might entail many, many years of isolation from your sense of self, there's actually an immense reward, too: living in a second language and culture expands your worldview. I think the play makes a compelling and nuanced case that learning a second language really does open the door for longterm self-discovery, even if it comes at a very great cost.
Maddie: As I mentioned, I'm currently in a Farsi class. Watching Elham and Goli trying to pronounce their Ws correctly as I'm trying to get the guttural sounds in the word khoshvaghtam, I felt deeply humbled in my own Farsi journey and deeply grateful for my grandparent's journey in particular. My first cry of the night was Roya’s show and tell presentation, where instead of bringing in a song in English, she brings in this beautiful, sweeping traditional Persian piece. She says: “We should remember that we come from this. And our voluntary migration from this is something we should be grieving. This is my song. I would be ever so grateful for your attention.” It's complicated, right? Because it is a migration from that beauty, but it's also a migration from an oppressive regime that in many ways aims to thwart that culture. That is heartbreaking. In this production, and at the Atlantic, Roya was my big first cry of the night, and it just continued from there.
May: The two moments where we hear Iranian music just knocked the air out of me, and I could feel it in the audience, too. To finally let the outside world of Karaj, Iran (where the play is set) sweep into this protected space breaks the dam down. I also wanted to say on a more personal note that my dad, when he was alive, only ever spoke English, he was fluent. But he would always accidentally blurt something out in Arabic in his sleep or if he got really angry or emotional or surprised. That was the language of his innermost emotional state, his subconscious. That's a part of him I never had access to because I don't speak the language. The characters I feel saddest for in this play are actually Nader and Claire, Roya’s son and granddaughter whom we never see onstage. Claire’s parents have made the choice for her to grow up in English and not learn Farsi. Many of us had that choice made for us. And then we grow up and we have limited access to the most important people in our lives.
Maia: I feel most connected to Roya’s storyline, but I’m Claire! Returning to what you said, May, I also found Marjan’s relationship to language, as the instructor, fascinating. She has a romanticized vision of her life in English and escapes into that possibility. It made me think about what it means to choose to lose yourself in another language, but also what it means to choose your native language and return to your home country, like Marjan and Omid do. As someone whose family had no option to return after 1979, it’s powerful watching people choose to stay. I saw my grandmother the other day and asked her if she could be anywhere in the world right now, where would she want to be? She said, “Iran.” To her, it’s still the most beautiful place in the world.
Maddie: Okay. Well, now you made me cry. I feel the same way. My grandmother is in Iran as we talk, but my grandfather will likely never get to go back before he passes. The choice to return is deeply powerful to witness onstage.
May: There is this distinction that everyone in the play is electing for a voluntary migration: no one is a refugee, they're all in this English class because they're choosing to leave, but have internal conflict about it. That's where every character's inner tension lies.
Maddie: To shift gears a little bit, I'm curious, from a design perspective, what's still resonating with folks?
May: I think it's worth saying that lighting designer Reza Behjat is the first Iranian designer on Broadway. That's pretty special.
Maddie: It was so visually striking to see actual lighting instruments coming down and adjusting, shifting the angle of light in space, like the literal sun shifting its beams over the course of the day. Inside the classroom, the lighting almost always felt fluorescent and harsh. But then light would come through those yellow curtains and this warming effect continued to elevate that distinction of the almost hostility of learning something versus the warmth and invitation of Karaj right outside the door. I thought that was really beautiful.
May: Yeah, in all elements of the design, but especially the lighting, there was this tiny little hint of the outside world: you get this warm light from the windows and then on the patio, you get a few little plants. Those little details vividly evoke the natural landscape of Karaj, but you never see it.
Maia: I'm still thinking about Marsha Ginsberg’s scenic design. Learning a language is iterative, and I appreciated how frequently the set is angled and in motion. That constant reorientation is reflective of how I’ve always felt while learning languages. You may feel secure in your grasp of one area but then you start the next lesson, and you have to find your grounding again.
May: I was really struck by the very first moment of the play, where Marjan opens the window and looks outside very dreamily. (That was actually the last moment of the play, too.) We learn from that moment that this is someone who has a rich inner life. But that wanderlust doesn’t just apply to the life she gave up in England. It's also here. She can look out the window and that can spark her vivid imagination just as much as going to another country. That quality of hers can exist in both places/languages and she doesn't even know it.
Maddie: Speaking to Knud Adams’ direction, the pacing is so singular. There's never a moment of acute conflict, we’re not really working toward a climax, but every character has his or her own arc. There's something beautifully simple about magnifying the ebbs and flows of joy and heartbreak that can happen even within a single class. I felt equal parts taken care of and emotionally ripped to shreds by the smallest moment.
Maia: In a language-learning environment, failure is so present. It can feel like you’re under a spotlight, and there can be extreme highs and lows. Elham in particular puts so much pressure on herself to perform. Immersion is important in language learning, but it’s also exhausting to always have to be “on.” Seeing these characters try and fail and try again—that vulnerability—it’s a reminder of how difficult communication is. I relate to Elham constantly switching into Farsi, because she wants to be understood. And Marjan nearly refuses to give in.
May: The power dynamics of when Marjan is the teacher versus when she is a friend are continually fascinating, and they vary with every character. There are times when she levels with them and acts like a peer, and others where she snatches up the reins and says, ‘No, I'm in charge here.’ There's endless complexity and juicy tension in that dynamic. Even though there are no real climaxes, the play is still rich in dramatic tension, and that was certainly one source of it for me. There’s also a beautifully thorny situation where she and Omid are falling in love in English. They can only fall in love in English because in their real lives in Farsi, they’re both in committed relationships.
Maia: Thank you for bringing that up. I think that’s what I meant earlier about escapism. We’ve talked so much about the language, but there are gorgeous moments where no one speaks. When Omid and Marjan sit quietly and watch American films, they are in a moment of suspended reality where they get to be different versions of themselves.
May: The whole reason he's in the class is not because he needs help to learn English, but because he's lonely and seems to believe that speaking English will give him a sort of companionship that he's lacking. For someone who’s about to get engaged to feel that loneliness is surprising and very complicated. This is a moment where Omid should feel surrounded by love and community and family, and yet he’s seeking something, and it leads him to construct this whole elaborate lie. The play magnifies every one of these characters’ small victories and losses and imbues them with much more weight. When Elham wins a ball-tossing language game in one scene, it is a sort of climax. We feel it as a huge triumph. One of the first things Goli says about Farsi is that every word is just so loaded and poetic that it sinks under its own meaning. I wonder if, by embedding every little moment with so much meaning, Sanaz has actually managed to use the English language to write a deeply Persian play.
Maia: It’s a reminder that poetry doesn’t mean opulence, right? Poetry can be soft, and spare, and still contain endless possibilities. This play is poetic, even though it’s in English. I recently saw Blind Runner by Amir Reza Koohestani, which is performed in Farsi. The show begins by rewording and reorienting the same sentence in both English and Farsi, bringing the translations closer together and further apart. It was a reminder that so much gets lost in translation, and languages can’t always match meanings. It was humbling how little I could understand without the supertitles. There’s a moment in English where Roya recites various English numbers she’s learned and it’s funny, but watching Blind Runner and hearing the actors count in Farsi I was very aware that I couldn’t understand any number above 10.
Maddie: I saw Blind Runner before I saw English. I would say about 75% of the people in the audience were speaking Farsi. To be in a room full of Iranians watching experimental theater was so cool. And then to go see this Broadway show a week later and also see a lot of people speaking Farsi around us? There's a huge Persian community where I’m from in California—I didn't realize I would miss hearing the language because I don't speak Farsi, but to hear Farsi around me feels like home. That is reflected to me in the final moment of the play: I can't understand much of the Farsi that is spoken, but what they are talking about right before is what home looks like and sounds like. And to me, that is what home sounds like: hearing Farsi all around you.
May: As someone who speaks zero Farsi, I was absolutely delighted to have no idea what was being said at the end of the play, because that felt like the whole point. I'm shut out of understanding and denied access because I don't know the language, which is what these characters have been experiencing all along. It's always really exciting to me when a play can instill two opposite experiences in audience members, but both are equally rich. Even though I didn’t understand the ending, I felt like I got a full meal out of it.
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English is now running through March 2. As you can probably tell, we think you should run to get a ticket.
