Review: In ‘English,’ Looking for a Language to Live In

Some plays are bouillabaisses, crammed with everything a playwright can put in the pot. Even if it means splattering the stovetop, these stories are going to boil.

Other plays are perfectly calibrated consommés. Refined and subtle, they shine at a simmer.

The Broadway transfer of Sanaz Toossi’s “English,” which opened on Thursday at the Todd Haimes Theater, is the consummate consommé. Even more so than when it debuted Off Broadway in 2022, and won the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 2023, it strikes me as a work of uncommon discipline despite its big and occasionally easy laughs. Without ever releasing a tight grip on its theme — or perhaps because of that tight grip — it suggests a world of small tragedies and smaller compensations.

The theme is the conflict between mother tongues and other tongues. Over six weeks in 2008, as four Farsi-speaking adults at a small school in Iran prepare for the Test of English as a Foreign Language, or Toefl, they and their teacher struggle with the often humorous mechanics of initial w’s and definite articles. (One does not say “the Canada,” for instance.) But in reaching for opportunities to remake themselves in a new language, they also bump up against the limits created by the one they already know.

That isn’t a problem for Goli (Ava Lalezarzadeh). Just 18, she has no goal in acquiring English except to enjoy the easy practicality and cultural currency of the international lingua franca. “English does not want to be poetry like Farsi,” she says approvingly. “English does not try to sink.” For Show and Tell, she plays a CD of Ricky Martin’s “She Bangs” on her boombox.

The other students find the burden of imperfect English heavy. Elham (Tala Ashe) has the hardest time achieving proficiency, despite needing it most. (Her acceptance to a medical school in Australia is conditioned on achieving a good Toefl score.) Roya (Pooya Mohseni) wants to master the language so she can live with her neglectful son in Canada. (He will not allow his Canadian-born daughter to be influenced by Roya’s thick accent.) And though Omid (Hadi Tabbal) is already glib in English and sounds fully American to everyone else, he knows the truth in his own inner ear.

In 21 scenes plus a prologue, we watch them progress and stall, surge and relapse under the warm but firm tutelage of Marjan (Marjan Neshat). Having returned to Iran after nine years in England, she has her own push-pull relationship to the language; she watches Julia Roberts rom-coms to sustain her fluency and perhaps something more. In English, she tells us, she eventually became a different person, a person she liked; what has happened to that person now that she’s back home?

The politics of an insular, religious dictatorship are never more than glancingly suggested. (Various characters mention the difficulty of obtaining visas.) Yet you are aware at all times of the way Toossi has built her finger-trap of a plot on the conflict between the unsustainable repression and fearful liberation that so many subjects of bad government experience. The question for the students, and for Marjan as well, is: Which language represents which quality? If English is freedom, why does it feel so elusive? If Farsi is repression, why does it feel like a beloved mother tongue?

In hewing narrowly to these questions, the production, directed with exceptional sensitivity by Knud Adams, creates more drama than its ingredients and its lifeboat of neatly differentiated characters would seem to permit. There is no big crisis, just a series of smallish, slightly muffled ones. Does someone fall in love? Maybe. Does someone learn a painful truth about someone else? Probably. Is anyone very different at the end than they were at the beginning? Hard to be sure.

But most six-week slices of life are like that. To overload the story with trauma would be to endanger its naturalism in a wave of forced feeling — something Toossi seems constitutionally averse to. As it is, the play is so hermetic, so fixated on seeing the world through its one lens, that it has trouble ginning up an ending, instead circling its territory several times before settling down like a dog for the night.

No matter. Adams’s staging and his work with the faultless actors pull off the trick of making what “English” doesn’t say out loud so moving. Also moving: the rotating box of a set by Marsha Ginsberg, which offers changing perspectives on action that might otherwise dig a rut. Also beautifully considered are the interstitial rearrangements of the classroom furniture; the shifting of angles of the sun and thus its shadows (lighting by Reza Behjat); the subtle changes of clothing (costumes by Enver Chakartash); and the unexpectedly nonliteral music, mostly solo piano works with a distinctive French accent. (Sound by Sinan Refik Zafar.)

These effects are bigger for Broadway yet paradoxically also more delicate than when “English,” a co-production of the Atlantic and Roundabout theater companies, appeared on the Atlantic’s stage, with the same cast, in Chelsea. Though a few laughs have been goosed — “She Bangs” is obviously a funnier Show and Tell than was Shakira’s “Whenever, Wherever” — the play somehow feels graver now. Elham in particular is a tougher character, in Ashe’s uncompromising performance: easier to understand and harder to like. The fury she feels at her own limitations, spilling everywhere, now fully earns Roya’s withering take on her: “In English you won’t have redeeming qualities.”

Whether we are to make more of that comment than Roya intends is another of the play’s open questions. Is English a bully? Goli loves it because it can do so much. Elham dislikes it for the same reason. Perhaps generalizing from her son’s insistence, Roya feels it as a betrayal. (Her analysis of his voice mail messages is devastating.) For Omid, and perhaps for Marjan, it is a lost lover, or a love they could never fully embrace.

Blame it on overamplified American culture: English is the boombox of languages. But also note that when handled with great care, it tells as quiet a story as can be heard.

English
Through March 2 at the Todd Haimes Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.