Tony Award nominee Marjan Neshat makes history in Broadway play 'English'

Marjan Neshat is a veteran of stage and screen who teaches fledgling actors. Like so many of us, she sometimes has bouts of self-doubt. “I think on the first day of class, I still always have imposter syndrome, but I've grown to live with it,” she says. “I never thought that I had the gravitas to be like, ‘I’m going to teach you acting.”

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This semester, her students at The New School got to witness self-doubt kicked to the curb when Neshat became a first-time Tony Award nominee. “I'm sure they're all a bit more smitten with me now,” she says, laughing.

Neshat earned the nod for her work - appropriately enoughplaying a teacher in Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer Prizewinning and Tony Award-nominated play “English,” which premiered on Broadway in the fall.

“There's something about this play that feels so bottomless,” she adds. “It kind of felt like winning the lottery because it was, to me, everything as an actress that I care about—it was artistic, and it was subtle and it was nuanced.”

“English” explores the ways in which language shapes identity, can help people feel understood or misunderstood and the push and pull of culture. It's set in a storefront school near Tehran, where four Iranian students are preparing over several weeks for an English language exam. Neshat plays their teacher, a woman who loves rom-coms and English but who is unmoored, a foot in Iran and one in England, where she lived for many years but never completely felt at home.