Good morning, and welcome to Broadway News’ Broadway Review by Brittani Samuel — our overview of reactions, recommendations and information tied to the Broadway opening of “English.”
RUNDOWN
Our mother tongue. It’s our native language, of course, but it’s also the architect of our ideas and governor of our rhythms. To learn a new language, as the four students preparing to take the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) in Sanaz Toossi’s “English” aim to, is to remake your sense of self. Toossi, an Iranian American playwright, understands this intimately and delves into the complexities of forging identity across languages in her warm, perceptive new play.
There’s a ton of intelligence at work in “English.” First, there’s the theatrical exercise: characters switch between Farsi and English, but since the play is presented to a predominantly English-speaking audience, actors only alternate their accents to signal the transition. What we hear (until the last few lines of the play) is entirely in English, yet we understand that we’re listening to two languages. These actors — Tala Ashe as the fiery Elham, Ava Lalezarzadeh as the wide-eyed Goli, Pooya Mohseni as the elegant Roya, Hadi Tabbal as the overachieving Omid and Marjan Neshat as their honey-toned teacher, Marjan — are uniformly excellent at gliding through the shifts.
