March 25, 2022
Sanaz Toosi has written a play, recently in production Off Broadway in New York, about the trials and tribulations of learning English as a second language.
Based in Karaj in 2008, the play has only four characters, all played by Iranian Americans four students and their teacher helping them prepare for their TOEFL exam.
There’s the teacher, Marjan (Marjan Neshat), somewhat neurotic medical researcher Elham (Tala Ashe), bubbly teen Goli (Ava Lalezarzadeh), somewhat arch grandmother Roya (Pooya Mohseni) and mild-mannered Omid (Hadi Tabbal), the only male in the play.
The play is titled, simply and expressively, “English.”
The play is entirely in English. When the Persian characters are trying to speak English, they stumble and mangle grammar. But when they are supposedly speaking Farsi, they speak in relaxed, unaccented and fluent English.
The play is entirely about trying to learn English and why that is important for the characters. There are no divergent plot lines no love scenes, no angry confrontations just the horror of trying to master a foreign language.
In a glowing review, The New York Times compared the play to a lifeboat movie in which the characters display “shifting alliances in the face of a looming threat and an eventual resolution involving the revelation of lies and someone cast overboard.”
The Times said, “The cast is uniformly excellent.”
The play opened at the Atlantic Theater February 22 and ran only briefly through March 13.
Toosi, reared in Orange County, California, is the only child of Iranian immigrants. She was preparing for law school and a life in the courts, but was drawn to writing plays a fact she hid from her mother. Toosi told the Times her mother realized that her daughter was hiding something and concluded her daughter had gotten pregnant!
Toosi, 30, learned Farsi at home, but otherwise lives in English. “And my Farsi gets worse every year. It’s painful for me. I wonder if my kids will know Farsi.”
Toosi has been startled by the reactions of American audiences. “There is laughter sometimes where I do not think there should be laughter. The accents get laughs. And it’s really uncomfortable some nights.”