'English' review: In Goodman's sublime production, language study fuels students' cultural politics struggle

“Why do we learn language?,” the teacher asks her students in “English,” the 2023 Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a group of Farsi-speaking adults in Iran learning the language of the title.

“To bring the inside to the outside,” says a student.

“Yes,” the teacher affirms. “To speak our souls…. And to listen. To the insides of others.”

The same, perhaps, can be said about why people write, produce, and attend the theater, a medium thoroughly mediated by language.

With “English,” now playing at the Goodman Theatre, playwright Sanaz Toossi has crafted a sublime play that makes us feel hyper-attuned throughout to what’s happening inside the play’s characters, even when much of the dialogue might superficially be covering their favorite color, or their efforts to list items one might find in a kitchen as a means of building their vocabulary.

Each character has come to this class for different reasons. For Elham (Nikki Massoud), scoring well on the TOEFL — a test of English proficiency — means the ability to attend medical school in Australia. Roya (Sahar Bibiyan) wants to be able to communicate with her grandchild in Canada. Omid (Pej Vahdat), the one man and the most advanced English speaker among the students, has an upcoming green card interview in Dubai. And for the youngest student Goli (Shadee Vossoughi), it simply means better, not-yet-defined opportunities.

But there are stories within these stories that Toossi, and this terrific cast, carefully reveal in a series of scenes that all seem to be the perfect length and no longer, which can also be said about the play as a whole, about 100 minutes with no intermission. Competitiveness and self-doubt can come to the fore; the characters can be nice to each other one moment, and mean the next, as they struggle with the relentless, and often comic, frustrations of learning a new language.

Toossi identified an ideal theatrical device to address our own language barriers, and that also accomplishes something deeper. When the characters speak Farsi — which they do with some frequency despite teacher Marjan’s (Roxanna Hope Radja) English-only mandate in class — they speak in perfect English, faster and fluently. But when they speak English, they speak with accents, some much heavier than others, and, depending on their skill level, haltingly.

Subdued in tone but fully engrossing and deeply moving, “English” has rich thematic layers; learning another language can have political, economic, even religious undertones. But Toossi focuses overwhelmingly on the personal, on language as a means of considering, perhaps even re-making one’s identity. The characters here don’t just have relationships with each other, but also relationships with the English and Farsi versions of themselves they hear when they speak.

That’s truer for teacher Marjan than perhaps for anyone else. Marjan loves English and, in Radja’s captivating performance, speaks it with a British-accented relish, having lived for nine years in England. Her passion for the language also raises a question that she is hesitant to answer. If she loves English so much, and everything it seems to signify, why did she return? And, to add even another layer of understated complication, Toossi doesn’t just deal with the feelings of self-worth unearthed by learning a foreign language, but also questions what happens when we begin to lose one we thought had been mastered.

The play is set entirely in an Iranian classroom but set designer Courtney O’Neill smartly provides us a view outside when the curtains are open. We can see the city itself on one side, and inside a couple of apartments on the other, just enough to give us a sense of urban life, of a reality beyond these walls that has both hard and soft qualities.

The same sense of subtlety and attention to detail pervades this entire Goodman production, directed by Hamid Dehghani, himself an Iranian immigrant. He clearly has the deepest of understandings of these characters and their aspirations, which can also be said of Toossi, the daughter of an Iranian immigrant. Set aside expectations created by nearly every other play set in the Middle East, as this one so clearly avoids explicit commentary on Iranian society, preferring to let the characters’ very presence in this classroom communicate what we need to know, along with the careful and detailed evocations of individual personality we get from the clothes they wear, from costume designer Shahrzad Mazaheri.

Dehghani, his design team, and this superb cast make every moment of the production dramatically active, sharp, clear, strikingly real, and altogether relatable. The play has twists that surprise, a lot of humor, and an extraordinary depth of human insight.

We can feel these characters’ insides coming out.