Global Tongue A class in Iran probes English's transformative and oppressive powers.

SOMETIMES I THINK you can only speak one language," says a character in Sanaz Toossi's English.

- SANAZ TOOSSI

"You can know two, but..." She trails off, her brows knitted and eyes faraway, leaving something unexpressed in words but plenty articulate in the reverberant air. It's an especially poignant moment in a play that's full of them while still maintaining its essential lightness. English doesn't sink toward soppiness; it-you can perhaps picture a gesture here, one made by another character when trying to describe how the English language feels different from her native tongue, Farsi. She pauses, then hovers her hand palm down, undulating it in gentle waves, the way you do in the front seat of a car with your arm out the window in the summer breeze. It's a floating, gliding movement. "English does not want to be poetry like Farsi," says this young woman, named Goli (Ava Lalezarzadeh), searching for the words to explain. "It is like some rice. English is the rice. You take some rice and you make the rice whatever you want." Whether this double ability-both to transform itself and to promise transformation and thereby opportunity to its speaker-is a gift of English or a reminder of the language's use as a tool of empire-building and cultural oppression is the uneasy question at the heart of Toossi's delicately wrought play. Its premiere three years ago at the Atlantic Theater Company won Toossi the 2023 Pulitzer for Drama.