We were able to catch a press preview of English, a play by Sanaz Toossi, this past Saturday at the Linda Gross Theater in Chelsea.
Officially opening its doors to public audiences on February 22nd, 2022, English has been met with glowing praise due to its ability to capture poignancy and make audiences laugh while drawing attention to the nuances of identity.
The show begins in a TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) classroom in Iran, where students Elham (Tala Ashe), Roya (Pooya Mohseni), Goli (Ava Lalezarzadeh), and Omid (Habi Tabbal) are engaged in a lesson with their teacher, Marjan (Marjan Neshat). Each student has a different reason for learning English, and each a different emotionally charged relationship with the language. Elham hopes to study medicine in Australia, and while she passed the MCAT with flying colors, she’s failed the TOEFL 5 times but needs to pass to enter the program. Roya wants to get close to her Canadian granddaughter and live with her son’s family there, but he requires her to learn English before coming since he doesn’t want to threaten his daughter’s assimilation. Goli, a sweet and hopeful 18-year-old, wants to open doors for herself. Finally, Omid, who seems to speak near-perfect English already, wants to apply for his green card. Throughout the show, each student’s personal insecurities are revealed slowly through their behavior in class, their triggers, and their conversations and relationships with each other and their teacher.
The resulting story and script paint a complex, troubled picture of language and identity. As the dominant language of the wealthy western world, English symbolizes oppression, forced assimilation, and the superiority complex of English-speaking countries to some of the characters. To others, it represents opportunity, hope, and shared connection with strangers, but the underlying conflict with one’s mother tongue still peeks through this rose-colored lens. Through the subtleties in the script revealing each character’s pent-up feelings and situational intricacies, and the actors’ skillful delivery and timing, English brings the audience into a difficult reality many immigrants face. Does learning another language to open doors for yourself have to mean losing part of who you are? Does losing language skills you once had diminish your value? And how does your proficiency in any language change how you come across in the most predominant form of human communication, spoken language? One of the most interesting concepts highlighted through the show’s content, to me, is how well language can and cannot capture who we are and how we represent ourselves to the world. One character feels like her poor English makes her “irredeemable” due to her blunt nature – softened by the nuances she can convey in her native language but rendered her cruel in English. Building off of this, how well can any language truly capture who we are? Even the most fluent tongue remains limited by its vocabulary, while other communication forms like body language and facial expressions take us the rest of the way. Language is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to portraying our identities – there’s so much more to who we are than any form of communication can capture. As the actors convey whether they’re speaking Farsi or English (by switching between Farsi-accented and American-accented English), so much of their identities are lost in English. Through this artistic choice, coupled with the politics and drama of the plot, Toossi doubly emphasizes the power of language in personal identity and broader society.
English will show through March 20th, 2022 at Atlantic Theater Company, and you can grab your tickets here: https://atlantictheater.org/production/english/