Sanaz Toossi began penning “English,” her Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, present astatine the Roundabout’s Todd Haimes Theatre, arsenic her graduate-school thesis. The play, a representation of an English-language people successful Iran, was, she has said, her furious absorption to the “Muslim ban”—as Donald Trump’s enforcement bid from 2017 was known—enacted arsenic she was pursuing an M.F.A. astatine N.Y.U. Toossi has described “English” arsenic her “scream into the void.” The existent show, then, is simply a surprise: a gentle, subtle acquisition that calibrates our ears to shifts successful pedagogy and understanding.
“English” débuted astatine the Atlantic, successful a co-production with the Roundabout, successful 2022. It’s chiefly a schoolroom comedy, directed past arsenic present by Knud Adams with an oculus to wry wistfulness. The amusement tracks an precocious English course, successful the metropolis of Karaj, Iran, successful 2008, wherever 4 big students effort to maestro caller vocabulary (“Things you find successful a kitchen. Go!”) and the precise un-Persian dependable of the missive “W.” When the characters talk successful English, they follow a dense accent; erstwhile they are meant to beryllium conversing successful Farsi, they usage accentless English, arsenic swift arsenic unobstructed thought. “My accent is simply a warfare crime!” 1 frustrated pupil complains. It lands arsenic a joke, but it hints astatine currents of civilization and empire.
The Atlantic accumulation remains fundamentally unchanged, and the cast, too, has travel to Broadway. The teacher, Marjan (Marjan Neshat), is focussed connected the TOEFL (Test of English arsenic a Foreign Language), but her students’ goals vary: the often petulant Elham (Tala Ashe) wants to be aesculapian schoolhouse successful Australia; the teen-age Goli (Ava Lalezarzadeh) is taking the trial to support her assemblage options open; Roya (Pooya Mohseni) mightiness beryllium moving to Canada; and the lone antheral student, the astir fluent Omid (Hadi Tabbal), says helium has an American green-card interview. The porousness of Iran’s borders is simply a given, and everyone oscillates, caught successful a limbo betwixt leaving and staying. Marjan exudes a definite sorrowful mystery, which is to accidental glamour—we larn that she lived joyfully successful the U.K. for 9 years, yet, for immoderate inexpressible reason, she came back.
Omid, whose motivations seldom marque sense, is drawn to Marjan, lingering during her bureau hours to ticker English-language romanticist comedies, specified arsenic an aged VHS portion she has of “Notting Hill.” The improbable pair’s transportation pulses on with the movie’s soaring last track, by Elvis Costello. “She whitethorn beryllium the song that summertime sings,” Costello bellows. (Good luck to anyone learning syntax from that.) Lyrical absurdity besides shapes the play’s astir precise comic scene. Goli stumbles into poesy adjacent arsenic she claims that she likes English for its unpoetic qualities. She has brought successful a Ricky Martin CD for show-and-tell. “She bangs, she bangs!” Ricky sings from a small roar box, arsenic shy excitement flits crossed Goli’s face. Then she explains:
A bang is simply a [Goli demonstrates banging].
But much than that:
A bang is pots and pans wrong the head.
It is simply a crash. A fender bender? . . .
Inside the heart.
A bang is however the beingness is created.
That is however she bangs.
The handsome schoolroom set, designed by Marsha Ginsberg, sits wrong a immense rotating model box, lit by Reza Behjat to look to interval successful a achromatic void. Of course, the acheronian abstraction astir the acceptable isn’t really a void. It’s our shared atmosphere. Seeing a play written successful effect to Trump’s archetypal Administration astatine the outset of his 2nd feels surreal. But Toossi keeps her governmental commentary oblique by showing america a casual, mundane Iran seldom seen successful the West. The women bash not set their loosely worn veils erstwhile they caput outside, for instance. Is this defiance oregon nonchalance? Toossi lets america wonder. Her involvement lies successful a much cosmopolitan question: the mode half-learned languages tin hitch against 1 another, sometimes erasing aspects—compassion, graciousness, humor—of the idiosyncratic utilizing them.
Toossi herself speaks some Farsi (her parents were calved successful Iran) and English (she was calved successful California), and respective characters meditate connected the interior displacements of bilingualism. For each the precise realism of the play’s mounting and dialogue, Toossi seems to beryllium penning allegorically astir a wider experience, possibly 1 acquainted to her, of the immigrant’s treble consciousness. The students mightiness correspond antithetic aspects of a quarrelling interior self. For Roya, English smashes and colonizes; for Marjan, it seduces and abandons. “I ever liked myself amended successful English,” Marjan says, but the mode she says it—dreamily, nostalgically—sounds similar a pistillate grieving.
If you privation to spot a play that grapples much overtly with the authorities of beingness successful Iran, Amir Reza Koohestani’s Farsi-language “Blind Runner,” by the Paris-based Mehr Theatre Group, is finishing an engagement astatine St. Ann’s Warehouse, arsenic portion of the Under the Radar festival. As video projectors provender grainy images onto acheronian walls, a jailed Tehrani pistillate (Ainaz Azarhoush) encourages her hubby (Mohammad Reza Hosseinzadeh) to assistance a pistillate who has been blinded astatine a protest. “I don’t request to deterioration a uniform, oregon screen my hairsbreadth for you to judge that I’m successful prison,” Azarhoush tells the camera. “Just ideate it,” the supertitles instruct us. I realized that Koohestani’s admonition hadn’t rather near maine erstwhile I saw “English” respective days later. Even the show’s breeziness felt subtly frightening. Goli talks astir Facebook—I kept hoping she wouldn’t post.
After attending “English,” trying to enactment retired wherefore I was frustrated by immoderate of its crippled twists and quality opacities, I reread “Wish You Were Here,” Toossi’s 2nd play to première successful 2022, written agelong aft “English” but produced lone a period aboriginal astatine Playwrights Horizons. In that much finely grained drama, a radical of pistillate friends successful Karaj chat their mode done the decades: revolution, the Iran-Iraq War, the reopening of the universities, spiritual encroachments. The friends’ raucous intimacy—in galore scenes, a pistillate is either coating another’s toenails oregon waxing her legs—dissolves arsenic astir of the women permission the country. Neshat again played the main character, Nazanin, who comes crossed arsenic a small mean and rather lost. I was reminded of however brilliantly Toossi tin constitute for radical who don’t recognize their ain motivations, and however Neshat blossoms erstwhile her characters person thing circumstantial to conceal. In “English,” too, determination are inchoate impulses, but Toossi seems to exert little power implicit them. In the gorgeous “Wish,” the playwright demonstrates acold much comfortableness with elision and, ironically, with the unspoken.
I was reasoning astir languages and the interior gears of learning them arsenic I sifted done a container of documents successful different Under the Radar show, 2 days aft seeing “English.” The Lebanese creator Tania El Khoury and her husband, Ziad Abu-Rish, a historian, staged a combined installation/performance astatine the Brooklyn arts abstraction Invisible Dog called “The Search for Power,” astir energy outages successful Lebanon. (Even earlier the caller Israeli bombardments, rationing could permission immoderate areas successful the state without powerfulness twenty-three hours a day.) After 1 specified outage, astatine their wedding, El Khoury and Abu-Rish took a vow to get to the bottommost of the seemingly intractable problem. Over respective years, they pursued the mystery, tracking down answers successful archives successful Brussels, Paris, Washington, and Beirut.
If you attended the installation mentation of the show, during the day, you were fixed a brace of headphones and ushered to a agelong table, laden with a wedding’s worthy of nuts and apricots, with a papers container astatine each spot setting. Through our headphones, we heard the couple’s relationship of their research. At their direction, we work Xeroxes of letters, successful French, connected Hotel St. George stationery, looked astatine photostats of American redevelopment plans from the nineteen-fifties, and held slippery movie reprints of Iranian newspapers. I felt a small similar a pupil again myself, sitting determination with my large wireless headphones and bending my caput down toward my work. The answers, arsenic the artists traced the beleaguered Lebanese energy authority’s troubles backmost much than a century, ever had to bash with graft and transnational exploitation. Thank goodness the researchers are comfy successful truthful galore languages, I thought, oregon those secrets would person stayed locked away. ♦
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