In Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer-winning play English, a classroom of four Iranian students and an English teacher wrestle—some more than others—with their Persian mother tongue to express themselves in a new language. In the process, the play offers a snapshot of Iranian society.
Premiering at New York City’s Atlantic Theatre in early 2022, the play is now having a moment: It will be staged in Stratford and London in May and June and on Broadway in December, but not before two other U.S. productions introduce the play to new audiences. Arya Shahi, a co-founder of PigPen Theatre Company, directs the performance now running at San Diego’s Old Globe, and playwright Naghmeh Samini will direct the play at Seattle’s ArtsWest in April. These productions are not the first times the play has been led by directors who share the heritage of the playwright and her characters; a production at Speakeasy Stage in 2022 was directed by Melory Mirashrafi (and this May and June, a production directed by Hamid Dehghani will play at the Goodman and the Guthrie). Shahi and Samini both told American Theatre that this perspective has already deepened their rehearsals.
These two directors relate to the play on a deeply personal level given their multilingual Iranian backgrounds, and each sees friends, family members, and parts of themselves in English’s distinct characters: students Elham, Goli, Roya, Omid, and teacher Marjan. Samini, who moved to the United States from Iran three and a half years ago, said that upon her arrival, “I just couldn’t recognize myself…because I didn’t have enough words to show my inner feelings.” In this sense, Samini says she connects deeply with Elham, given her “desire to be native in this language while she has so many problems talking in a foreign language.”
In the play, Elham’s struggle with English hinders her true self from shining through and makes her seem at times abrupt and displeased. At 28-years-old, she has failed the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) exam five times, but maintains an unwavering fixation on it and its ability to let her leave Iran to study gastroenterology in Australia. Frustrated during the classroom show-and-tell activity, Elham very directly says, “Every day in here I feel like idiot, and I want everyone to know I am not idiot.” Samini confessed, “I feel completely the same,” adding in a poetic manner reminiscent of the Persian language, “words are the blood of relationship, and if you don’t have enough words for your relationship, you don’t have blood in your veins.”
For both the directors, English highlights the intertwined nature of identity, relationships, and language. Shahi, who recently published a book exploring similar themes, An Impossible Thing to Say, said “identity changes through the prism of the words.” Shahi’s book tells almost the reverse story of Toossi’s play, as it follows an Iranian American teenager whose identity is in limbo as he speaks English fluently but struggles to grasp Persian and connect with his relatives.
One of the key moments in the play for Shahi is when Roya, a 54-year-old grandmother, repeatedly calls her son, Nader, only to be met with his voicemail. “I just can’t watch a grandma try that hard and be ignored, but you understand what’s happening on both sides of it,” Shahi said. “There’s so much weight in Iranian culture about age, who and what deserves respect—Iranian culture is so theatrical.”
The single-act play goes beyond its ostensible setting, a classroom in Iran preparing for the TOEFL exam in 2008, to emphasize the intimacy of these relationships. For Shahi, the classroom “is a transitional space, in the same way that a theatre is somewhere you go to be transformed and transition into a new person.” Both the directors appreciate that the play, unlike many cultural productions relating to Iran, is not overly political, and instead focuses on universal themes. “What I like about this play is that it doesn’t try to show Iranian women as superheroes,” Samini said, adding, “It just shows us as real people with strengths and weaknesses.”
The two directors adopted different casting approaches to embody the play’s characters: young, naïve Goli; brutally honest Elham; devoted grandmother Roya; secret-filled Omid; and yearning Marjan. For Shahi, it was crucial that the cast and production members had an “in” with it, a personal understanding or connection with the storyline. The connection could include having Iranian heritage, experience learning a new language, or knowing a relative like Roya, for example. Half of his creative team and all of the cast except for Omid (played by Joe Joseph) are Persian. The two characters that speak Persian in the play’s last scene, Elham and Marjan, are fluent Persian speakers. For Samini, it was important that the entire cast be specifically Iranian American because of the deeper cultural understanding they would bring to the production.
Shahi’s production at the Old Globe features Pooya Mohseni as Marjan, Iranian Canadian actress and playwright Tara Grammy as Elham, Iranian actress Mary Apick as Roya, Ari Derambakhsh as Goli, and Joe Joseph as Omid. Shahi, as he does for every show, curated a public Spotify playlist with the cast that features Iran’s beloved Googosh, Hayedeh, and Andy & Kouros, alongside hits from Puerto Rican singer Ricky Martin, Colombian pop star Shakira, and French performer Édith Piaf.
Casting the roles of Marjan and Omid was especially important for Shahi, who called it “the hardest thing I ever did.” That’s because of the potential implications for how the relationship between these two is read: It can be directed and interpreted in different ways, most dramatically as romantic, or more conservatively as mentorship. He described it as “a relationship of Marjan projecting her past onto Omid, and Omid projecting his past onto Marjan, and the audience projecting every trope from every movie in the world onto them.” On the other hand, Samini said her production will highlight the “unusual romantic experience” they share. Samini’s Seda Iranian Theatre Ensemble and ArtsWest have finished casting but have not yet announced the actors.
An established Iranian playwright in her own right, Samini, whose first directing experience was on her own play The Forgotten History of Mastaneh with Seda Theatre, said about the challenges of directing English, “When you write a play, it’s like your child, but now I’m going to foster a child. I’m really thinking about how I’m going to grow a child from somebody else’s mind.”
While much of the play moves between classroom English, spoken haltingly or imperfectly, and fluent English-standing-in-for-Persian, the last scene of the play memorably features a conversation between Elham and Marjan entirely in Persian, without supertitles or explanation. For her part, Samini is looking to “add more tastes of Persian language to the production” without changing the play too much. For Shahi, who has directed with PigPen before, the hardest part about directing, especially a “Pulitzer Prize-winning play about my people,” is “trusting yourself.”
With the recent acclaim for English, Shahi wants to ensure that the Old Globe’s staging isn’t “resting on any laurels,” adding that he wants his “production of English to feel like a production at a college where nobody has a Pulitzer Prize,” so that people don’t show up “just to not engage because they think they know what they’re going to get.” The production has already been extended a week due to popular demand. On Feb. 2, the theatre, in partnership with the Persian Cultural Center of San Diego, hosted an Iranian American Community Night, which included a social mixer and discounted tickets.
“Sanaz Toossi wrote the play by herself, but I feel that we all have our own share in her success,” Samini said. “It will open many doors to Iranian Americans and immigrants who are working in theatre. It brings hope for all of us.”
Said Shahi, “We don’t have a Suzan-Lori Parks or an August Wilson or a Nilo Cruz or a Lin-Manuel. Sanaz is it. She’s the one. And how cool is it that she’s our age?”
An earlier version of this story erroneously claimed that these are the first two productions of English directed by Iranian or Iranian Americans. A mention of the upcoming Goodman/Guthrie production has also been added.
Mandy Taheri (she/her) is an arts and culture journalist. Follow her on X, @mandytaheri and Instagram, @mandy_a_taheri
