English by Sanaz Toossi. Directed by Knud Adams. Set design by Marsha Ginsberg. Costume design by Enver Chakartash. Lighting design by Reza Behjat. Sound design by Sinan Refik Zafar. Projection design by Ruey Horng Sun.
Cast: Tala Ashe, Ava Lalezarzadeh, Pooya Mohseni, Marjan Neshat, and Hadi Tabbal.
Theater: Todd Haimes Theatre
Tickets: RoundaboutTheatre.org

Ava Lalezarzadeh, Pooya Mohseni, Tala Ashe, Marjan Neshat, and Hadi Tabbal Photo by Joan Marcus

English takes an all-of-the-above approach as it invites us to spend time with four adult students gearing up for the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) exam at a small language school in Karaj, Iran in 2008. Because this is a fairly high-stakes culminating course for the students, their teacher Marjan (Marjan Neshat) insists that all conversations take place in English; she even keeps a chart on the whiteboard on which she posts tally marks whenever anyone slips into Farsi during lesson time.

Still, it's hard for the students to adhere to their stilted, stumbling, and heavily accented phrasing as they engage in English language exercises. As one of the students comments in her frustration: "This isn't how people speak. They speak with words. That have meaning."

And so, tally marks be damned, there are times they break off and have lively, colloquial, and expressive conversations in Farsi (which, for the sake of the New York audience, we mostly hear in lively, colloquial, and expressive English) until Marjan presses them to slip back into the clumsiness of attempting to "converse" in the language of vocabulary exercises.

So who are these students, and why is it that they want so much to be able to speak English, especially since relations between Iran and English-speaking countries have been rocky for quite some time? Herein lies what is missing from the otherwise well-acted and engaging 100-minute play, whose cast and director, Knud Adams, are coming to Broadway as a tight-knit unit from the Atlantic Theater Company's 2022 Off Broadway production.

The play smoothly sidesteps the politics of the international rift by generally avoiding referring to the United States altogether. One of the students, Roya (Pooya Mohseni), wishes to move to Canada in order to join her son and his family, though she does feel she has been coerced into taking the class. Another, Elham (Tala Ashe), has been trying to get into medical school in Australia; for her, passing the TOEFL after previous failed attempts is vital.

Of the other two students, one, Goli (Ava Lalezarzadeh), is studying for the joy of learning, while Omid (Hadi Tabbal), the only male in the class and the most fluent in English, has his own reasons for being there. You will notice that he does seem to find ways to spend alone time with Marjan (borderline flirtatious but always respectful) as the pair watch American rom-com videos together after class.

Because the performances are so strong, the cast members are able to mine English for every nuance of humor and individuality that is available to them. But the 100-minute play itself only skims the surface about what it means to move beyond the acquisition of tourism language skills in order to wrestle with the tradeoffs faced by any immigrant embarking on the path of assimilation (an either/or proposition that ignores the reality of bilingualism/biculturalism as an option). What we get within the walls of Marjan's classroom is never less than compelling, but we are left wanting to know more about the characters who live in a country about which most in the audience likely know little beyond the "axis of evil" designation and Department of State travel advisories.