Absolutely nothing is lost in Sanaz Tosi’s translation English With its wit, grace, and unwavering compassion, the Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a group of Iranians who long for the West makes its Broadway debut, two years after its Off-Broadway run garnered critical acclaim and won regional theater audiences.
Maybe the two-year wait was a coincidence. This comedy-drama — the seriousness isn’t shocking, the humor is — comes at a moment in history when listening seems as rare as the desire to be heard is urgent. Tosi and her director Knud Adams issue an appeal that couldn’t be more timely.
The setting is a classroom in Karaj, Iran — Marsha Ginsberg’s brilliant design is essentially a rotating cube that requires us to consider and reevaluate new perspectives — where adult students are trying to learn English to take a proficiency test crucial to their aspirations. Some pick up quickly, others seem somewhat blocked, and all of them have a deep need for connection, whether they can express it or not.
As the English course progresses over a series of weeks, the students and their teacher (a wonderfully poignant Marjane Neshat), introduce themselves for better or worse, as secrets are revealed and old hurts surface. There’s even potential for romance, emphasis on the word potential.
Roundabout Theater Company has imported this impeccable original, and the actors bring depth to each character: Tala Ash plays Elham, a young woman whose honesty often turns into insolence, and whose repeated failures in auditions suggest a profound ambivalence about desires; Ava Lalezarzadeh is 18-year-old Julie, whose youthful enthusiasm for exploration puts her classmates’ reluctance into stark contrast; Hadi Tabbal as Omid, the only man in the group whose ease with the new language suggests a past that he only gradually reveals.
Hadi Tabbal And Marjan Nashat‘English’
Joan Marcos
Perhaps most interesting is Roya, played by the wonderful Pouya Mohseni. She wants nothing more than to join her son and young granddaughter in Canada, but her son has conditions: she must learn English and she must leave behind the old ways—that is, the non-Western ways, lest they influence the little girl. .
In a wonderful scene of classroom show-and-tell, Roya, her steely reserve finally revealing an underlying sadness, recounts her son’s recent use of the word “visit” for what Roya has planned as a move. She plays the voicemail messages her son left, one in English and one in Persian:
“Have you heard how softer he is in his native language?” she asks her classmates. “Did you hear that he remembers where he came from and who he came from? He forgets in English, but remembers in Persian.”
Ruya’s bewilderment is just one of the visceral reactions provoked by what appears to be a non-threatening endeavor, but Tosi knows all too well that language, words, and even accents can say more than meets the ear. Issues of self-perception and identity, dignity and kindness, rudeness and intolerance, all come down to not just what we say, but how we say it.
In an almost ingenious conceit that allows the audience to listen as the characters show who they are when they speak one language and who they are when they speak another, each actor adopts a broken English diction as the characters try out their new language. When they speak in their native Persian, the words are spoken in a flowing, even colloquial English that shows how comfortable these students (and their teachers) are with themselves, when they’re not trying to be something else.
Without giving too much away through plot developments, each character will have at least one eureka moment, someone will disappear from the story almost entirely (which is even more unfortunate), someone will show some true color and at least two will find some unexpected common ground.
The cast, without exception, plays every twist, turn, pulse, and emotion beautifully. If you’ve ever had to be in a classroom and struggle with something that always seems to stay out of your reach, you’ll be lucky to share the space with people like these. English It is a wonder.
address: English
place: Todd Himes Theater on Broadway
Written by: Sanaz Al-Tusi
Output: Knud Adams
ejaculate: Tala Ash, Ava Lalzarzadeh, Pouya Mohseni, Marjan Nashat, Hadi Tabbal
Operating time: 1 hour 40 minutes (no break)