urban excavations

English
Featuring Tala Ashe, Ava Lalezarzadeh, Pooya Mohseni, Marjan Neshat, and Hadi Tabbal
Todd Haimes Theatre
January 3, 2025 – March 2, 2025
production site

Downtown moves uptown from Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross stage 2022 production, just as The Band’s Visit (opening at ATCA in 2016 and on Broadway in 2017), seem to feature most successfully with small scale stories in terrific sets that transfer almost intact to a big Broadway stage. The secret sauce here, whether a story is a musical like The Band’s Visit, or a play with some terrific sound design like English, is the a universal story told with great dramatic specificity.

Sanaz Toossi’s beautiful play, winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Drama, showered with nominations and awards during its off Broadway run, arrives on Broadway intact, resonant, and taking deep dramatic breaths with the audience. An English-language class in Iran that is is gentle, gracious, layered, filled to the brim with theatrical elements in production — revolving cube of a classroom set by Marsha Ginsberg with outside and inside and views inside from the outside, all utilized; lit from above and behind and through the set by Reza Behjat; with nuanced sound design by Sinan Refik Zafar from music players in ear buds and movie sound tracks as projected in the classroom and voices from a telephone; and characters in marvelously varied and character illuminating costumes by Enver Chakartash. This is a beautiful play to look at and to feel, to hear and to consider.

This could be viewed as a schoolroom comedy — folks of various education levels meet together in the ultimate equalizing context, a language course, where everyone is equally adrift. And the playwright makes the initial simple and important decision to have the play entirely in English (with occasional phrases in Farsi, in my memory), but of course the staggering English we hear at times, in the students delivering their lessons, is dropped for deeply mellifluous flowing English reflecting the poetic sensibilities of high education levels of the students. We are in an advanced English course in Karaj, Iran in 2008 where four adults work on their vocabulary and their accents. Teacher Marjan (Marjan Neshat) carries her own motivational mysteries (we learn she had lived in the UK for a time) and aims to direct her students through the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). The drama of this delicious creation is of course that all students are not the same in ability or motivations. Goli (Ava Lalaezarzadeh) is a teen looking toward maximizing her options for college, Elam (Tala Ashe) needs to demonstrate English proficiency to attend medical school in Australia, Roya (Pooya Mohseni) wants to improve her English to pass muster with her son who is assimilated in Canada, and Omid (Hadi Tabbal) says that he is seeking an American Green card.

The gentle reveal of this play is not the mechanics of the classroom or the presentation of language being acquired (though this is achieved with great success in the writing and Knud Adams’ direction) but the potent political and socially explosive multiple reasons each student has for enrolling and staying in the class. Why does the nearly fluent Omid hang out with Marjan after hours? Goli finds poetry in English and we suddenly focus on the music in language.

Bilingual challenges, and the decision to choose one language over another, is a theme explored by several characters. The playwright explores this idea in 21 scenes and a prologue — this condition of living neither one place nor another has a cost to to poetic expression and an individual’s sense of place in the world. When one characters chastises herself for losing her voice, for not liking herself in one language or another, we viscerally feel the costs of what might feel a pragmatic classroom exercise. Learning a language is not the same as learning how to fix a carburetor or how to take a photograph, but it provides a different way of articulating your place in the world, with potentially profound costs.

The reasons for each student to attend and potentially succeed in this language class vary intriguingly and offer a marvelous range that illuminates generally and specifically, and focuses an English speaking American audience on this Persian / Iranian population and the politicization of our relationship with them over recent decades. Setting this play in 2008 removes these communities from present day conflagrations but they are simmering here. And in English, Toossi takes us quietly through the minefield, one student at a time.

© Martha Wade Steketee (January 25, 2025)

Playwright | Sanaz Toossi
Director | Knud Adams
Set Design | Marsha Ginsberg
Costume Design | Enver Chakartash
Lighting Design | Reza Behjat
Sound Design| Sinan Refik Zafar
Projection Design | Ruey Horng Sun