Winning a Pulitzer Prize and staging productions at prestigious theaters didn’t mean playwright Sanaz Toossi was ready to stop fine-tuning English. “I’m never done,” she told one of the play’s stars, making small adjustments in the final days leading up to its Broadway debut.
You can’t blame the 33-year-old Iranian-American for wanting to get it right. After all, English isn’t just her first Broadway production—it’s also a first for its entire cast. The play marks the Broadway debuts of five Middle Eastern actors, and is also a milestone for three remarkable creatives behind the scenes: director Knud Adams, set designer Marsha Ginsberg and lighting designer Reza Behjat.
Refusing to rest on her laurels was the right approach because English has become one of the best reviewed and richest theatergoing experiences of the season. In the hands of its stars—who have achieved a harmony with the material that practically begs the Tony Awards to create an ensemble honor—this stunning work of compassion is unforgettable.
(Photo by Emilio Madrid for Broadway.com)
More Than Words
In 2008, inside a classroom in Karaj, Iran, five students prepare for the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language). Each of them carries a different, high-stakes reason for passing.
One’s relationship to language is at the heart of the play’s quiet yet profound power. Toossi employs an effective theatrical device to differentiate between the characters speaking English versus their native Farsi. When struggling to follow the classroom’s English-only rule, the students speak with accents—stilted and awkward. But when they slip into Farsi, Toossi has them speak unaccented English—a striking choice that frees them, making them feel more alive, more human.
Ava Lalezarzadeh plays sweet, young Goli, who analyzes Ricky Martin’s “She Bangs” during a hilarious Show and Tell for her clasmates. Of the accent device, she explains: “It gives the audience a great sense of what it’s like to be an insider or an outsider, and to feel that tension and struggle in our language.”
She adds that one of her favorite moments comes when two characters briefly interact in Farsi: “For the first time, the audience is put in the position that the characters have lived in for the entirety of the TOEFL class, and have to tolerate the discomfort of being an outsider for a moment.”
Between Two Worlds
“This play is very personal to me,” Toossi says. “I wrote it out of rage. I wrote it as a scream. I wrote it when I was nobody—just for myself.”
That rage stemmed from the 2017 Muslim Ban, which suspended U.S. entry for citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries, including Iran. “I wrote the play in response to the way I’ve always known that many Americans perceive my parents—who speak with an accent—as less intelligent, less human. And how deeply absurd that is, given my parents are speaking a second language.”
Toossi, born and raised in Orange County, California, reaps the benefits of moving through the world as a native English speaker. But that, too, brings its own complexities. “When I speak Farsi, it’s the language I feel like I should be speaking. It’s natural for me. And my experience speaking English in the world is that often I open my mouth and people say, ‘Oh! You sound like me. You’re American!’”
That tug-of-war between cultures and identities emerges in Toossi’s play most pointedly in a battle of wills between Marjan (Marjan Neshat), the class’ mysterious teacher, and Elham (Tala Ashe), who has failed the TOEFL five times. After learning that Marjan lived as “Mary” for nine years while living in Manchester, England, Elham digs in her heels. “Marjan is not hard to say,” she bites. “Our names—they are our names.”
For Neshat, whose onstage counterpart poignantly shares her own name, bringing this story to Broadway feels like winning the lottery—not just because of the opportunity, but because of the depth of representation it offers. “I play a character who is mysterious and romantic,” she says. Teacher Marjan watches romantic American films like Moonstruck and Notting Hill to improve her English and finds a connection with Omid (Hadi Tabbal), her star pupil. “[She] doesn’t know why she’s more alive in this moment than another. That kind of representation—I’ve never seen it before.”
Neshat credits Toossi for carving out a space where these complexities could finally take center stage. “Sanaz said, ‘These are my stories, and I’m so inspired by Iranians, but I also have my voice.’ And so in this play, she wrote it for us—those of us who belong in two different places and have never found a place to really belong. And she gave that to us to do it in our voice.”
(Photo by Emilio Madrid for Broadway.com)
Everything Is Political
English rarely references global politics, keeping its conflicts strictly within the confines of the TOEFL classoom. Still, its characters’ lives are inescapably shaped by the politics of their homeland.
“It can be perceived as non-political because it stays away from how we tend to want to receive stories about the Middle East in America,” says Tabbal. “It’s not about Iranian-American conflict, the Iran-Iraq war or any of the clichés. But this is a play about language, about power, about access. It’s also about home and borders and who you are when you speak what you speak. And what you lose, and what you gain, when you learn the language that we take for granted in the States. These are very political subjects.”
Pooya Mohseni, whose character Roya hopes to join her son and grandchild in Canada, agrees. “We’re talking about the lives of these human beings and how they’re affected by certain policies,” she says. “It’s not blatantly political because nobody sits there dissecting international politics. But as these characters talk about where they need to go and what they need to do to get there, you can’t say that politics doesn’t permeate every aspect of their lives.” (Watch as costume designer Enver Chakartash increasingly dresses fiery, frustrated Elham in green as the play progresses. It’s a nod to the Iranian Green Movement that arose in protest of the 2009 election of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.)
“Persian culture to me is boisterous, joyful and vibrant—totally divorced from any regime lording over Iran,” Toossi comments. “But there is pain, because we’re talking about people who left—oftentimes unceremoniously.”
“I wrote it out of rage. I wrote it as a scream. I wrote it when I was nobody—just for myself.” –Sanaz Toossi
A New Classic
Adams, who helmed the world-premiere productions of two consecutive Pulitzer Prize winners in drama—Toossi’s English and Eboni Booth’s Primary Trust—finds the play hard to define. “It’s hilarious, but it’s not a comedy. It’s heartfelt and soulful, but it’s not a melodrama.”
He says presenting such a delicate piece alongside Broadway’s big hits posed its own challenges: “Protecting its delicacy from the gravitational pull of what it means to be housed on 42nd Street was something we all took really seriously” (the show neighbors both Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and Disney’s blockbuster Aladdin).
(Photo by Emilio Madrid for Broadway.com)
“Opening night was one of the best nights of my life,” says Toossi. “We’ve been at this play for a long time, and to see it scale up so beautifully, to see this thing we’ve all been sitting with for years be celebrated was… It’s a miracle.”
Even before the acclaim, Adams was confident English had the makings of a classic. “It’s full of meaning and message, and its language is so beautiful on the page,” he says. “The fact that it’s a little beguiling reminds me of the classics I fell in love with. Many new plays feel like fast fashion—offering a quick hit of meaning or style. But I find the plays that linger are those you can return to again and again.”
A Language All Its Own
Looking back on the five years leading to English’s Broadway debut, Toossi takes pride in what they’ve built together. “What many find surprising is that a play set in the Middle East can be beautiful and romantic and soft and quiet,” she says. “That is what I’m really proud of, and that’s a testament to all of us, not just me.”
And that’s what makes English so special. Broadway often embraces larger-than-life stories, but Toossi’s play finds its power in the small, everyday moments—where language is a bridge, a barrier and sometimes, both.
Each night, as Marjan, Elham, Omid, Roya, and Goli struggle through their lessons, the audience isn’t just watching a play about learning English. They’re witnessing a story about belonging, identity and the quiet negotiations we make to find our place in the world.
For Toossi, that’s what mattered most. “When Knud and I first met, I said, ‘Please, I just want it to be beautiful.’”
And English is exactly that—beautiful not just in its staging, but in its silences, its stumbles and the moments of understanding that make it unforgettable.
