Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer Prize-winning ENGLISH translates beautifully to the Great White Way

• By drediman
• January 31, 2025
• No Comments

Earlier this week at the Todd Haimes Theatre, I was able to catch Roundabout Theatre Company’s Broadway transfer of Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer Prize-winning English (the play originally ran Off-Broadway in 2022 in a co-production with Atlantic Theater Company). Set in a sterile classroom in Iran, the work tracks four Iranian students from different backgrounds as they prepare for the TOEFL exam — a test used internationally to gauge proficiency in the English language — for various personal reasons (e.g., study, work, immigration, etc.). When the students and their guarded instructor start letting their defenses down to reveal their inner aspirations and insecurities, the dramatic gears of the play begin to churn.

As a play essentially about learning English, the work’s characters necessarily speak in both Farsi and English, which the playwright cleverly gets around. When they speak in Farsi, Ms. Toossi has the actors act in fluent English, so as to reveal their “true selves”. However, when the characters attempt to speak in English, they revert to communicating in fractured phrases — which at times are uttered with painful frustration, and occasionally to amusing comedic effect. What the play does so brilliantly is how it subtly intersects notions of language, identity, and self-worth without disturbing the play’s sensitively wrought naturalism and character-building. As an immigrant and pseudo bilingual speaker, I particularly found myself identifying with its exploration of cultural assimilation and the residual effects of colonialism. That being said, I was also fully captivated by the specificity of each of the character’s journey. Indeed, as with its Off-Broadway iteration two years ago, I left the theater both illuminated and shaken by English‘s collection of short, seemingly unassuming scenes that stealthily amount to a heartrending, tightly-structured tapestry. If anything, this Broadway transfer has heightened the playwright’s philosophical interrogation of language and the various implications it has on these character’s lives, resulting in an even richer theatrical experience.

The clear-eyed, slow-burning direction by Knud Adams patiently allows the play’s pressure points to reveal themselves. Through the use of a rotating classroom set — which calls to mind The Lehman Trilogy‘s rotating office set, and has been slightly enlarged for the Great White Way — Mr. Adams elegantly marks the passing of time between scenes, as well as manifests the mounting tension within the classroom. As for the play’s five ensemble performances, they’re very fine across the board and have only deepened since Off-Broadway. Each actor continues to have an intimate connection to their respective roles, which is apparent in how organically they “open up” over the course of the play. Particularly impressive are Tala Ashe as the aggressive and competitive Elham, as well as Marjan Neshat as the instructor who is tested to her limits.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

ENGLISH
Broadway, Play
Roundabout Theatre Company at the Todd Haimes Theatre
1 hour, 40 minutes
Through March 2