Notes on English
I recently went to see the off-Broadway play, English. Here are some of my takeaways and reflections. Let me know if you’ve seen it or plan to see it, then check out today’s Community Notes.
Have you ever experienced a work of art that resonated so deeply with you that it felt like home, like you’ve experienced it before, even if its origins exist half a world away and you know you’ve never technically experienced it before?
Well, I did last weekend when I went to see the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, English by Sanaz Toossi at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. A play that was remarkable and complex by way of its simple message: Language communicates much more than information, as it is infused with deeply human, cultural, and intimate meaning that often surpasses specific languages and specific utterances. Yet each language is also steeped in its own rules and idioms and colloquialisms that make it unique, like each individual who chooses to learn it and wield it.
English demonstrates that we do much more than speak language. It demonstrates how we feel language, we live language, we embody language, we create language, how we have complicated relationships with language, and how, most importantly, language works to create our identities.
The play is set in a classroom in Karaj, Iran, in 2008.
Marjan is the English instructor who lived in Manchester, England, for nine years before returning to Iran. She is strict about enforcing an ‘English-only’ rule in her classroom, which creates tension as the adult students struggle to learn. However, over the course of the play she forges complex connections with her students as they learn English, all who have different motivations for learning the language, which inevitably force her to reckon with her own relationship with the language.
Elham is a highly competitive but frustrated student who is desperate to pass her TOEFL exam to attend medical school in Australia but resents having to learn English and feels it conflicts with her Iranian identity. And in many ways, she acts as a foil to Marjan, who often waxes poetic about the English language and the cultural experiences and memories it offers her via music and movies.
Omid is the only man in the class. He is highly proficient in English and enjoys watching American movies with Marjan, though his real motivations for taking a beginner TOEFL class are a mystery to the others until the end of the play.
Roya is an older, soft-spoken student determined to pass the TOEFL exam so she can communicate with her granddaughter in Canada, as she believes she will move there to live with her son and his family soon.
Goli is the youngest student at around 18 or 19 years old. She is sweet, earnest, and deeply passionate about learning English, finding aesthetic beauty in the language and relishing the cultural currency it can provide. She often offers the comedic relief needed when the other students, especially Elham, get tense.
As the play progresses and the students participate in various class assignments, language drills, and word games, so does the relationship each student has to the English language as Marjan’s strict directives force them to abandon speaking Farsi, leading to simmering frustrations, heated arguments over cultural identity, and the intense emotional realization that language acquisition can simultaneously open doors to new lives and opportunities while closing older, familiar doors and connections to home and oneself.
The play opens with Goli trying to communicate her simple makeup routine to the class, immediately offering a few relatable laughs, regardless of language barriers. Then Goli states how she likes English because “English does not want to be poetry like Farsi,” and that it lacks the heavy, rigid poetic burdens of her native Farsi. She compares the English language to rice— how it is flexible, practical, and light enough to stay afloat on top of water rather than sinking. Which invites audience members to consider the utility of language itself.
During the play, we continue to encounter Elham’s resistance to learning English and understanding English, which drives a lot of poignant dialogue around language learning concerns like: Is Ricky Martin’s accented English still English? Does someone need to have an ‘official’ reason like getting a state-sponsored visa or earning an exam score to be permitted to work abroad to want to learn a language? Does someone need their family to speak a language in order to become proficient in it? Does someone need to respect and like a language in order to become proficient in it? What happens on a personal level when one acquires, or loses, full proficiency and immersion in a language? What drives ‘full immersion’ in a language? When does one know they are ‘fluent’ in a language — is it when they pass an exam, or when they express themselves honestly and authentically in it?
And can someone be seen and interacted with as if they are different people in different languages? In the play, for example, Omid asks Marjan, “Why do you only like me in English?” and Goli and Elham discuss how Elham sounds ruder and less caring in English than in Farsi. We see Roya become less genial in Farsi than in English as she navigates her relationship with her son, whom she can’t reach. And we see Marjan’s presence as an English instructor become less confident as she speaks more Farsi.
The play also uses a brilliant linguistic trick: actors speak in highly accented English when their characters speak English, and perfectly fluent English when the audience understands that they are really communicating in their native Farsi.
In the Denver Center for the Performing Arts’ Study Guide for English, patrons are offered the following note:
“Sanaz Toossi’s English takes place in an English language learning classroom in Iran. It is part of a lineage of plays that explored language barriers, creatively finding ways to either remove or emphasize the language barrier for the audience. In the play, the teacher, Marjan, requires her students to speak English in the classroom for proper immersion, so the audience usually hears the characters speaking a language in which they have varying degrees of proficiency.
In a note prefacing the published script, Toossi writes:
“In the world of the play, when a character is speaking English, the audience will be hearing accented English. In the world of the play, when a character is speaking Farsi, the audience will be hearing unaccented English.”
In the script, spoken English is bolded, whereas Farsi is unbolded. Additionally, the use of brackets indicates what words the character is looking for but might not have in their new vocabulary.”
Toossi wrote English as a nuanced response to anti-immigrant sentiment and travel bans. Instead of relying on typical diaspora or war-torn tropes, she created a localized, grounded story that relies on this brilliant linguistic trick of accented language to offer behind-the-scenes access and meaning to an English-speaking audience, which really hits home at the end of the play when the last scene is primarily in real Farsi, not translated English.
For the English-speaking audience, the realization of what is lost (and not lost) in translation in the final scene hits home when the dialogue between Marjan and Elham is left untranslated, allowing audience members to feel the comfort, joy, loss, and deep self-expression the characters share, even if they don’t speak Farsi.
Bottom line, English masterfully balances the toil and comedy of language acquisition with the confusing heartbreak of assimilation and invites audiences to immerse themselves in the power of language and what it does and can do on a profoundly human level.
As a former ESL instructor for all ages, this play resonated with me on so many levels because I know firsthand that understanding why a student is learning English is as important as teaching them grammar and vocabulary. There are so many reasons to learn a second language, and it isn’t always as easy as it seems, especially for adult learners whose complex identities are already imbued with their native languages, and for younger learners whose identities are still forming and remain so impressionable.
Additionally, as someone who loves being reminded of the power of language and storytelling in art in all its forms, this play is one I cannot recommend enough, especially now, as US-Iran relations are at a breaking point and we all need to be reminded how language and storytelling can bridge gaps between humans.
What are your thoughts on this topic? Have you seen English yet?
What is the last play you saw, and what did you think of it?
How do you think art can bridge divides between humans?
Leave a comment to join this dialogue, and don’t forget to share this post with others so they can join this dialogue too.
© This work is not available for artificial intelligence (AI) training. All Rights Reserved by K.E. Creighton; Creighton’s Compositions LLC.
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You may also enjoy:
English: Speaking a Universal Language, in a Broadway Premiere by Frank Scheck. New York Stage Review. 1.23.2025
‘English’ is a Distinctly Persian Play: a 3-in-1 Conversation with Maddie Rostami, May Treuhaft-Ali, and Maia Safani. 3viewstheater.com .1.30.2025
Transcript for Sanaz Toossi and Lynn Nottage: The Politics of Playwriting. Pulitzer on the Road
So I was compelled to restack your first line but i don’t think this gave credit to the themes you brought out in English. I had forgotten about this play and hope to enjoy it sometime.