TDF Stages

The cast of Sanaz Toossi's Pulitzer Prize-winning play on bringing the show to Broadway

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How does speaking a different language change who we are? That poignant question is at the heart of English, Sanaz Toossi's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, which premiered at Atlantic Theater Company in 2022 and has now transferred to the Roundabout Theatre Company's Broadway house for a limited run. Set in Iran in 2008, the insightful comedy follows a class of adults preparing for the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), each anxious to master the tongue for different reasons. As they stammer, spar and connect, they discover—alongside their dedicated teacher—that becoming fluent in English will shape their identities as well as their futures.

English marks the Broadway debut of almost everyone involved: the Iranian-American playwright, the Obie-winning director Knud Adams and the winning five-person cast—Tala Ashe, Ava Lalezarzadeh, Pooya Mohseni, Marjan Neshat and Hadi Tabbal—who are reprising their critically acclaimed performances from the original production. Considering the themes of the play, TDF Stages decided to let the actors speak for themselves in their own potent words about why English is particularly meaningful to them, especially during this fraught political moment.

Tala Ashe plays Elham, a sharp medical student who resents having to learn English to study gastroenterology in Australia.

I first did a reading of the play in 2019 when Sanaz was still a student. I was struck by how much I identified with it and how naturally her language fit in my mouth, which is a rare experience. She wrote the play in response to the Muslim ban during the first Trump administration, describing it as a kind of scream into the void. I don't think she ever imagined it would be produced. It's both sad and ironic that we opened this production a few days after his inauguration with the possibility of another Muslim ban looming. I think Sanaz captured that heightened state so many of us remember, of feeling so deeply, deeply unwelcome in this country. She also captures this feeling of what you gain in yourself by learning a new language, but also what you lose and may never recover. It was such a gift to perform this play in 2022 at the Atlantic Theater Company and now, almost three years later, to revisit it again.

My character, Elham, is distinct from the others in that she has the most specific goal for taking the class. For her, the TOEFL is the gateway to pursuing higher education and immigration. She is really hardworking, tenacious and used to being the smartest person in the room. But here, she encounters a subject she struggles with, one that is really challenging for her. The stakes are so high because, without [mastering English], she can't move on to the next chapter of her life.

Elham doesn't like English and doesn't appreciate its complexities. She butts heads with her teacher, Marjan, who is asking her to relax and enjoy the language and play games with it. I think Elham recognizes the colonialism [embedded] in the English language. In the play, she imagines a world where, instead of America or Britain, the Persian Empire had expanded so greatly that everybody in the world spoke Farsi. She understands that it's chance and circumstance that English has become the dominant global language, and she resents it—not only because she struggles with it, but also because she loves her mother tongue.

I was born in Tehran and left as a baby, though I returned a couple times as a child and as an adolescent. It's almost impossible to put into words how personal this play is for me. I sit in my dressing room surrounded by pictures of my parents and my grandparents. I feel the weight and the presence of my ancestors with me onstage. As actors, we always bring ourselves to the work, but the depth of connection here is unique. It's both deeply gratifying and, at times, painful. Sometimes as I stand onstage, I can't help thinking: This could very easily be me if circumstances had been different.

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Marjan Neshat plays Marjan, the teacher who insists her students only speak English in her classroom.

Meeting Sanaz Toossi was a real artistic happening in my life. I had always dreamed of finding an artistic partner, and I feel like I've found that in her. Did my name influence the name of the character that I play? I don't know, but Sanaz says—jokingly or lovingly—that she wrote me into existence.

I was born in Iran, but we moved when I was one year old. We lived in London and California during my early childhood. Then, in 1979, we moved back to Iran and ended up getting stuck there after the revolution. We left in 1984 and moved to Seattle. I have memories of Iran and family there. What I love about this play is that many of us involved in it live in this liminal space: We're not fully from here or there. Sanaz has captured that. If I go back to Iran, I'm seen as a foreigner, but it's not as though I'm all American either. There's always this search for belonging and home, a theme explored really beautifully in this play and in her next work, Wish You Were Here, which I also performed in.

My character, Marjan, loves the English language for reasons she doesn't fully understand. She feels more alive in it. I think this reflects the idea of loving something that doesn't necessarily belong to us, something we were not born to. Marjan's passion for the language is challenged by Elhan in a way that she can't quite explain. There's a real mystery to her character and what is at Marjan's core. She learns a lot from these her students, I think, more than she ever has before.

Being part of this play is incredibly meaningful to me because I really love this art form. When I first graduated from drama school, there was so much stereotyping. If you were Middle Eastern, you were often saved for plays where you had to explain our history or circumstances. To debut on Broadway in a play that is elegant and mysterious and filled with longing and humor feels like a dream. To have the opportunity to reveal both our culture and our souls through behavior rather than explanation… I pinch myself every day that it is actually happening.

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Hadi Tabbal plays Omid, the sole male student whose fluency in English rankles his classmates.

Without being overt, English delves into identity, language and communication. It's extremely political yet free from political clichés. What unfolds onstage is woven with so much depth, leaving space—for the viewer, the actor, the receiver, the collaborator—to breathe their own self into it. This is something very few writers can accomplish.

I'm Lebanese, born and raised in Beirut. I came to the US for grad school in my early twenties. My native tongue is Lebanese Arabic, but my first written language is English. I don't speak Farsi, but within the Middle Eastern community—Iranians and Arabs—we often portray one another interchangeably. We also face similar stereotypes. Sometimes, we refer to ourselves as the "brown people."

Growing up in a colonial country I spoke three languages: English, Arabic and French, along with Lebanese, our dialect. When I moved to the States as an actor, I was enrolled in accent reduction classes because, a few decades ago, the industry standard was that you had to sound like a neutral American—or, to be honest, a neutral white American—in order to work. In defense of that argument, it did help [my career] and still helps me get work. However, there was an erasure that was taken for granted and never questioned. My proficiency in English was excellent, as I attended American schools. Yet, there was a discrepancy between how I sounded and my actual command of the language, which was probably better than many Americans.

Navigating colloquialisms, accents and the cultural aspects of language is something this play touches on, and it's very personal to me. In Russian Troll Farm, I played a Russian married to the daughter of an oligarch who was stuck in a terrible job trolling people online. I have no biographical connection to that experience, but as actors, our job is to connect with the heart of the character and their actions. With a play like English and others with Middle Eastern content and context, I find myself bringing my own personal experiences.

During rehearsals, particularly at the Atlantic when we were first digging into the play, we had many discussions about my character Omid—why he is in the class, what the language means to him and how his relationships with the other students and the teacher evolve. Omid navigates worlds and identities that are very familiar to me. It would likely be much harder—and perhaps not right—for someone unfamiliar with these dynamics to play these parts. Having lived through the experience of navigating multiple cultures, geographies and languages feels essential in this play. I don't know how one could embody these roles without having some connection to otherness.

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Pooya Mohseni plays Roya, who's learning English to be closer to her assimilated son and his family, who live in Canada.

For me, this play is like a love letter to the women that I grew up with. It tells the stories of people I know—my grandmother, my mother—and explores this sense of: How much of yourself do you need to leave behind? I was born and raised in Iran. My brother, who's about eight years older than me, left Iran in the 1980s because of the Iran-Iraq War. So, this idea of families getting divided across continents—the effects of that separation on the connection between the different parts of the family—is very personal to me. Language is the most obvious part of it, but culture also changes because of lack of proximity. When people talk about family, part of it is the shared physical closeness that you have with others. When you lose that, your emotional closeness also diminishes because you don't have shared experiences. As someone who came to the US as a teenager nearly 30 years ago, I've realized that while you can learn multiple languages, it's almost impossible to speak more than one fluently at any given time.

The play is about an English class, but as Hitchcock might call it, that's the MacGuffin. On the surface, it may seem very simple: these five people, a teacher and four students, sitting in a classroom. But it's really about so much more. It's about their relationships with their surroundings, their culture and their goals. It's about their connections to their families, their ambitions, their regrets, their hopes and dreams. The play also examines the Anglocentrism of the world we live in, and the judgments people make based on how someone sounds rather than what they say. My mum is an English teacher, and she often says, "Just because I speak with an accent doesn't mean I think with an accent." The assumptions that people have—that if you speak with an accent, you're less intelligent or don't fully understand—are deeply ingrained. I think this play brings those things to the stage in a way I've never seen done.

For my character, Roya, English is both a friend and a barrier. She's in this class because she wants to connect with her family—the most important people in her life—who are far away geographically. But at the same time, the language has created a cultural and emotional distance between them.

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Ava Lalezarzadeh is Goli, the youngest and most enthusiastic student in the class.

Goli is ever the optimist and loves to learn. For this 18-year-old girl, the class offers her an opportunity to find her voice. Through English she gains access to new parts of herself and discovers confidence in the language. Her earnestness, compassion, kindness and genuine yearning to be there resonated deeply with me. Many of the other students have specific, tangible goals for passing the TOEFL. But for Goli, this is an exploration of herself. Perhaps because she's the youngest, she remains unburdened by the heavier realities of life.

In some ways, we all mirror our characters and inhabit them so fully. I'm Iranian but I've actually never been to Iran. I have an American accent and when I speak my mother tongue it reveals exactly where I am from. Farsi feels foreign in my mouth because I was born here. The characters in the play experience a similar dynamic with English in Iran—it's the other side of the same coin.

Over the past year and a half, I've been taking weekly Farsi lessons. It's been fascinating to realize that when I'm forced to slow down and approach Farsi deliberately, I'm able to express feelings I've never been able to express as eloquently in English, even though English is my dominant language.

I wrote and acted in a short film called In the Garden of Tulips. It's based on my mom's story of fleeing Iran during the Iran-Iraq War. The film explores themes of leaving one's homeland and being thrust into adulthood in an instant. Being Iranian, post-revolution means grappling with these themes of being split between two worlds, longing for a homeland you've left behind, and facing the difficult questions of staying versus leaving. These are themes that intersect with the stories told in the play.

It's always been a childhood dream of mine to perform on Broadway and I'm so grateful that it's with this production. To do it with people that I love, in a story that speaks so deeply to my soul, it's an incredible gift.

These interviews have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

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