LANGUAGE LESSONS

Sanaz Toossi's “English” arrives on Broadway.

- BY HELEN SHAW

The wry, wistful comedy is set in an E.S.L. classroom in Iran.

Sanaz Toossi began writing “English,” her Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, now at the Roundabout’s Todd Haimes Theatre, as her graduate-school thesis. The play, a portrait of an English-language class in Iran, was, she has said, her furious reaction to the “Muslim ban”—as Donald Trump’s executive order from 2017 was known—enacted as she was pursuing an M.F.A. at N.Y.U. Toossi has described “English” as her “scream into the void.” The actual show, then, is a surprise: a gentle, subtle experience that calibrates our ears to shifts in pedagogy and understanding.

“English” débuted at the Atlantic, in a co-production with the Round-about, in 2022. It’s primarily a school-room comedy, directed then as now by Knud Adams with an eye to wry wistfulness. The show tracks an advanced English course, in the city of Karaj, Iran, in 2008, where four adult students try to master new vocabulary (“Things you find in a kitchen. Go!”) and the very un-Persian sound of the letter “W.” When the characters speak in English, they adopt a heavy accent; when they are meant to be conversing in Farsi, they use accentless English, as swift as unobstructed thought. “My accent is a war crime!” one frustrated student complains. It lands as a joke, but it hints at currents of culture and empire.