Tag Archives: Sanaz Toossi

ENGLISH FIRST: A TICKING TIME BOMB

Omid (Hadi Tabbal) and Marjan (Marjan Neshat) form an intimate bond in Sanaz Toossi’s English (photo by Joan Marcus)

ENGLISH
Todd Haimes Theatre
227 West Forty-Second St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 2, $72-$313
www.roundabouttheatre.org

It might be difficult for non-English speakers to learn the world’s most spoken language, but Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play, English, has made a smooth transition from the Linda Gross Theater to Broadway. In fact, the Atlantic-Roundabout coproduction is even more powerful now given the current US administration’s war on illegal (and legal) immigration and America First policies.

According to the Oxford Digital Institute, English “is the language of international communication,” spoken in more than one hundred countries even though it “is a hard language to learn due to its complex grammar rules, pronunciation variations, and vast vocabulary . . . riddled with exceptions and irregularities, making it difficult to master. Additionally, English has a diverse range of accents and dialects, making it challenging for nonnative speakers to understand and communicate effectively.”

Everything I wrote in my review of the off-Broadway premiere in February 2022 still holds true: Concepts of home and personal identity lie at the heart of Toossi’s poignant and involving work, which continues at the Todd Haimes Theatre through March 2. The play is set in a small classroom in Karaj, Iran, in 2008, where Marjan (Marjan Neshat) is teaching basic English to four students who are planning on taking the TOEFL, the Test of English as a Foreign Language, for different reasons. Marjan insists that they speak only English in the class rather than Farsi, their native tongue.

Roya (Pooya Mohseni) wants to be able to speak with her new granddaughter, who lives in Canada with Roya’s son and his wife, who are not teaching the child Farsi. “I hope you not forget. Nate is not your name,” she tells her son, who used to be known as Nader.

Elham (Tala Ashe) has passed her MCATs but needs to learn English so she can study gastroenterology in Australia. “My accent is a war crime,” she angrily admits.

Omid (Hadi Tabbal) has an upcoming green card interview in Dubai, but his English is already excellent, nearly accentless. When asked why people learn language, he says, “To bring the inside to the outside.”

Goli (Ava Lalezarzadeh) is an eighteen-year-old girl who believes Ricky Martin is a poet. “People like accent,” she says, not ashamed of who she is.

After a presentation by Goli doesn’t go particularly well, Marjan, a married woman who spent nine years in Manchester before moving back to Iran with her family, says, “Don’t be sorry! We were speaking English with each other. I think it’s one of the greatest things two people can do together.”

As Elham’s frustration with English builds — she repeatedly uses Farsi in class, accumulating negative points — she gets into disagreements with everyone else, speaking frankly, without apology. “Goli, people hear your accent and they go oh my god it is so funny you are so stupid. . . . Okay if I have accent, bad TOEFL score. Omid has accent, no green card. Roya’s accent? Disaster.” Some of them equate the attempted erasure of their Iranian accent when speaking English with the loss of their identity, as if they are surrendering their unique culture. “Don’t you think people can do us the courtesy of learning our names?” Elham says to Marjan, who went by “Mary” when she lived in England.

“English isn’t your enemy,” Marjan insists. “English is not to be conquered. Embrace it. You can be all the things you are in Farsi in English, too. I always liked myself better in English.” But Marjan won’t acknowledge to herself that that is exactly the problem. “I feel like I’m disappearing,” she says later to Omid.

Four students and a teacher learn about life and language in English (photo by Joan Marcus)

English is beautifully written by Toossi (Wish You Were Here) and gracefully directed by Knud Adams (I’m Revolting, Pulitzer Prize winner Primary Trust), giving each character room to develop. Although they go back and forth between English and Farsi, whenever they speak English, the actors use Iranian accents, but when they talk in Farsi, they lose the accent, sounding like plain old longtime Americans, a device that serves as a metaphor for colonialism, nation-building, and ethnocentrism.

One of the only changes from the Atlantic version is that the song Goli plays for show-and-tell has switched from Shakira’s “Whenever, Wherever” to Martin’s “She Bangs,” in which the Puerto Rican heartthrob sings, “Talk to me. Tell me your name. / You blow me off like it is all the same. / You lit a fuse and now I’m ticking away like a bomb. / Yeah baby.”

Marsha Ginsberg’s revolving cube set is open on two sides, revealing the inside and the outside; the movement feels even stronger this time, more precarious. When the rotation stops so a scene can begin, a stanchion might block part of your view of a character, as if they are disappearing.

Enver Chakartash’s costumes meld traditional Iranian clothing, like head scarves, with American accents. The cast is exceptional, quickly forming a cohesive unit; it probably wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to assume they have each had to deal with the issue of making sacrifices to learn a new language and culture in some way, as all of them, in addition to the bilingual Toossi, were either born in Iran or Lebanon or their parents were. English was actually Toossi’s NYU thesis, written in response to Donald Trump’s Muslim travel ban and anti-immigration policies.

About halfway through the play, Marjan tells the class, “If you are here to learn English, I am going to ask you to agree that here in this room we are not Iranian. We are not even on this continent. Today I will ask you to feel any pull you have to your Iranian-ness and let it go. Keep it outside the wall of this classroom. In this room, we are native speakers. We think in English. We laugh in English. Our inhales, our exhales — we fill our lungs in English. No more Farsi. Can we agree to that?” Toossi understands the kind of sacrifices it takes to make a new life in a new country.

In the original production, Farsi was never actually spoken, but on Broadway, the final words are now in the Iranian tongue, a sharp parting shot at what’s happening in America and around the world.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

WISH YOU WERE HERE

Five friends get ready for a wedding in world premiere of Sanaz Toossi’s Wish You Were Here at Playwrights Horizons (photo by Joan Marcus)

WISH YOU WERE HERE
Playwrights Horizons, Mainstage Theater
416 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 5, $49-$89
www.playwrightshorizons.org

First-generation Iranian-American playwright Sanaz Toossi follows up her wonderful professional debut, English, which ran earlier this year at the Atlantic, with the even better Wish You Were Here, which opened tonight at Playwrights Horizons.

Written in 2018 as her NYU thesis in response to Donald Trump’s Muslim travel ban and anti-immigration policies, English is set in a TOEFL classroom in Karaj, Iran, in 2008, where four Iranian adults are learning to speak English as they and their teacher question the meaning of home and how language and culture impact their identity.

Written in 2019 as a response to Trump’s threat to retaliate against Iran after the Western Asian republic shot down an unmanned US drone, Wish You Were Here follows the trials and tribulations of five close female friends in Karaj from 1978 to 1991 who experience what Toossi calls “detached homesickness” as the nation goes through major changes, from the Islamic Revolution to the Iran-Iraq War.

The story unfolds in ten scenes that all take place in the same well-accoutred living room. Salme (Roxanna Hope Radja) is in a giant wedding gown, getting ready for her special day. Shideh (Artemis Pebdani) is giving Zari (Nikki Massoud) a pedicure, announcing so everyone can hear, “Your toes are disgusting.” (There are a lot of bare feet throughout the play.) Nazanin (Marjan Neshat) makes adjustments to the dress while flirting with Rana (Nazanin Nour), who is très elegant in her shiny silk pajamas, smoking a cigarette as she does Salme’s hair.

As they continue to primp, they regale one another with a string of hysterical dirty jokes and good-natured insults. “I’m steaming out of my dress, Shideh,” Nazanin says, referring to her nether regions. “Ew,” Shideh replies. “My pussy could iron a shirt,” Nazanin adds. Rana asks, “Oh what kind of shirt?”

Shideh (Artemis Pebdani) has a lot to say as Nazanin (Marjan Neshat) applies makeup to Zari (Nikki Massoud) and Salme (Roxanna Hope Radja) hovers behind them (photo by Joan Marcus)

“If a man saw her toes, I think his penis would fall off,” Shideh says about Zari. Rana admits, “Silk does not breathe well. Whatever you’re smelling is me and I don’t want to talk about it.” And Zari advises Salme what to do when encountering a man’s member: “When you first see one, smile. Smile so big. Smile bigger than you’ve ever smiled in your life. Like you need to swallow a plate.”

It’s an enchanting scene in which we fall in love with the characters while learning key facts about each of them: Shideh is studying to be a doctor and is considering going to school in America; Salme is the most religious one, regularly praying, believing that you “can’t jinx G-d’s will”; the easygoing Zari is in the market for a husband; and the ultracool Rana and the occasionally mean Nazanin plan to avoid marriage and children, although Nazanin lets it be known that she wants to eventually return to Iran after living it up in Miami. (Coincidentally, in English, Neshat plays a teacher who made a life for her and her family in London but came back to Karaj, perhaps regretting that decision.)

A year later it is Zari who is getting married, but a pall is cast over the proceedings when Shideh mentions Rana’s name; Rana, who is Jewish, has gone missing, along with her parents and brother. Salme is trying to find her, but Nazanin says, as if trying to convince herself, “If she wanted to vanish into thin air, with no trace, no word, without shit, then that’s how she wanted to do it.”

Nazanin (Marjan Neshat) and Salme (Roxanna Hope Radja) cement a bond in Wish You Were Here (photo by Joan Marcus)

But as we soon discover, Nazanin has a problem with people leaving, whether it’s a friend moving away with a new husband, another friend going off to study abroad, or a best friend disappearing in a country becoming ever-more dangerous. As many Iranians choose to escape their homeland because of war and an oppressive regime, Nazanin feels stuck, resenting those who attempt to make a new life for themselves and their family instead of getting out while she still can. It’s a bitter pill, especially when seen in retrospect. “Why don’t I want to leave?” she wonders. It’s a question people ask themselves every day across the globe.

Wish You Were Here is directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch (Animal, The Year of Magical Thinking) with a warm and welcoming intimacy that invites us into these women’s complex lives with, as the characters often say, “no judging.” The comforting set is by Arnulfo Maldonado, with handsome costumes by Sarah Laux, subtle lighting by Reza Behjat, and meticulous sound by Sinan Refik Zafar and Brian Hickey.

The hundred-minute play was also written by Toossi as a love letter to her mother and her mother’s friends, immigrants who started all over in the United States; parts of the story are based on real experiences. Toossi, who was born and raised in Orange County, California, and is now based in Brooklyn, has beautifully depicted the ups and downs, the sheer joys and the petty jealousies, that define female friendship.

Over the course of thirteen years, Iran underwent tremendous change, but Toossi does not focus so much on world events as on how they impact the women’s relationships with each other; the scenes involving only two of the women at a time are particularly emotional and heart-wrenching as Toossi explores the many layers of attachment, mere cordiality, and sincere love the women share. While Salme is afraid of pulling off the tape when Nazanin is waxing her legs for fear of hurting her physically, Zari is not afraid to tell Nazanin, “You have a way of making me feel really lonely.”

The cast is exceptional; it truly does seem like you’re watching five friends go about their daily existence, dealing with love and loss as they dance wildly to a song on the radio, hide under a table during a bombing, kneel down to pray to Mecca, or deliver yet another pussy joke. In between scenes, the actors make minor changes to the living room to indicate a shift in location, moving around tables or opening the curtain in the back to reveal a bright garden. It’s as if the five actors, and the audience, need a short break from the intensity of the play while getting ready to see what the next year holds in store for everyone. I can’t wait to see what Toossi has in store for all of us next.

ENGLISH

Sanaz Toossi’s English takes place in a TOEFL class in Iran (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

ENGLISH
Atlantic Theater Company
Linda Gross Theater
336 West 20th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 20, $76.50
866-811-4111
atlantictheater.org

Concepts of home and personal identity lie at the heart of Sanaz Toossi’s poignant and involving English, which opens tonight at the Atlantic’s Linda Gross Theater. A coproduction with Roundabout Underground, the play is set in a small classroom in Karaj, Iran, in 2008, where Marjan (Marjan Neshat) is teaching basic English to four students who are planning on taking the TOEFL, the Test of English as a Foreign Language, for very different reasons. Marjan insists that they speak only English in the class rather than Farsi, their native tongue.

Roya (Pooya Mohseni) wants to be able to speak with her new granddaughter, who lives in Canada with Roya’s son and his wife and is not being raised to speak Farsi. “I hope you not forget. Nate is not your name,” she tells her son, who used to be known as Nader.

Elham (Tala Ashe) has passed her MCATs but needs to learn English so she can study gastroenterology in Australia. “My accent is a war crime,” she angrily admits.

Goli (Ava Lalezarzadeh) is an eighteen-year-old girl who wants to speak like Shakira. “People like accent,” she says, not ashamed of who she is.

Four students and a teacher learn about life and language in English (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

They play word games, do show-and-tell, and discuss English vs. Farsi. “I want to speak English. Before I speak Farsi good, I know I want to speak English,” Goli says. “English does not want to be poetry like Farsi. It is like some rice. English is the rice. You take some rice and you make the rice whatever you want.”

Roya resents having to learn English and is furious that her son has turned away from his culture, projecting that rage onto her teacher. “You talk about Farsi like it’s a stench after a long day’s work. Tell me, Marjan, what is it about where we’re from that you find so repulsive?” she argues.

As Elham’s frustration with English builds — she repeatedly uses Farsi in class, accumulating negative points — she gets into disagreements with everyone else, speaking frankly, without apology. “Goli, people hear your accent and they go oh my god it is so funny you are so stupid. . . . Okay if I have accent, bad TOEFL score. Omid has accent, no green card. Roya’s accent? Disaster.” Some of them equate the attempted erasure of their Iranian accent when speaking English with the loss of who they are, as if they are surrendering their unique culture. “Don’t you think people can do us the courtesy of learning our names?” Elham says to Marjan, who went by “Mary” when she lived in England.

Goli (Ava Lalezarzadeh), Elham (Tala Ashe), and Roya (Pooya Mohseni) think about their futures in Atlantic world premiere (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

English is beautifully written by Toossi and gracefully directed by Knud Adams (Paris, The Headlands), giving each character room to develop. Although they go back and forth between English and Farsi, the latter is never heard; whenever they speak English, the actors use Iranian accents, but when they talk in Farsi, they lose the accent, sounding like plain old longtime Americans, a device that serves as a metaphor for colonialism, nation-building, and ethnocentrism. It’s no coincidence that the song Goli plays for show-and-tell is Shakira’s “Whenever, Wherever,” in which the Colombian-born singer and dancer proclaims, “Lucky you were born that far away so we could both make fun of distance / Lucky that I love a foreign land for the lucky fact of your existence.”

Marsha Ginsberg’s revolving cube set is open on two sides, evoking the inside and the outside. Enver Chakartash’s costumes meld traditional Iranian clothing, like head scarves, with American accents. The cast is exceptional, quickly forming a cohesive unit; it probably wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to assume they have each had to deal with the issue of making sacrifices to learn a new language and culture in some way, as all of them, in addition to the bilingual Toossi, were either born in Iran or Lebanon or their parents were. English was actually Toossi’s NYU thesis, written in response to Donald Trump’s Muslim travel ban and anti-immigration policies.

About halfway through the play, Marjan tells the class, “If you are here to learn English, I am going to ask you to agree that here in this room we are not Iranian. We are not even on this continent. Today I will ask you to feel any pull you have to your Iranian-ness and let it go. Keep it outside the wall of this classroom. In this room, we are native speakers. We think in English. We laugh in English. Our inhales, our exhales — we fill our lungs in English. No more Farsi. Can we agree to that? Yes? Thank you.” Toossi understands the kind of sacrifices it takes to make a new life in a new country while also realizing that the play’s audience is likely to be predominantly white non-Farsi speakers.

English continues at the Atlantic through March 20; Toossi’s Wish You Were Here, about a group of women (including one played by Neshat) facing tough choices as the 1978 revolution approaches, begins previews April 13 at Playwrights Horizons.

PLAYWRIGHTS HORIZONS FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY VIRTUAL GALA

Who: Heather Christian, Mykal Kilgore, Carla R. Stewart, Ali Stroker, Marinda Anderson, Cassie Beck, Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Reed Birney, Aya Cash, Kirsten Childs, Milo Cramer, Sarah DeLappe, Larissa FastHorse, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Peter Friedman, Dave Harris, Lucas Hnath, Michael R. Jackson, Sylvia Khoury, Taylor Mac, Matt Maher, John-Andrew Morrison, Kelli O’Hara, Annie Parisse, Pedro Pascal, Max Posner, Tori Sampson, Rhea Seehorn, Lois Smith, Paul Sparks, Jeremy Strong, Sanaz Toossi, more
What: Fiftieth anniversary virtual gala
Where: Playwrights Horizons online
When: Wednesday, June 23, free with RSVP (donations encouraged), 8:00
Why: Over the course of fifty years, seven Pulitzer Prizes, thirteen Tony Awards, and forty-seven Obies, Playwrights Horizons has lived up to its mission as “a writer’s theater dedicated to the support and development of contemporary American playwrights, composers, and lyricists and to the production of their new work.” On June 23 at 8:00, PH will celebrate its golden anniversary with a virtual gala featuring appearances by a wide range of creators with connections to the company, which is based on West Forty-Second St. The evening will be highlighted by a quartet of performances: Carla R. Stewart singing “Lifted” from Tori Sampson’s If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must be a Muhfucka, Mykal Kilgore singing “Memory Song” from Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop, Heather Christian delivering “Recessional” from Prime: A Practical Breviary, and Ali Stroker singing “Her Sweater” from Kirsten Guenther and Ryan Scott Oliver’s Mrs. Sharp. In addition, among those wishing PH a happy anniversary will be Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Reed Birney, Sarah DeLappe, Larissa FastHorse, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Lucas Hnath, Taylor Mac, Kelli O’Hara, Annie Parisse, Pedro Pascal, Lois Smith, and Paul Sparks.