English
Opening Night: February 22, 2022
Theater: Linda Gross Theater
Website: atlantictheater.org
Two words set in motion award-winning playwright Sanaz Toossi’s intricate and profound New York debut: “English Only.” This is the mantra that rules one classroom in Iran, where four adult students are preparing for the TOEFL — the Test of English as a Foreign Language. Chasing fluency through a maze of word games, listening exercises, and show-and-tell sessions, they hope that one day, English will make them whole. But it might be splitting them each in half.
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February 22, 2022
How our mother tongue gives us voice yet limits our world — and how a new tongue expands that world yet may strangle our voice — is the subject of “English,” a rich new play by Sanaz Toossi that opened on Tuesday at the Linda Gross Theater. Both contemplative and comic, it nails every opportunity for big laughs as its English-learning characters struggle with accents and idioms. But the laughter provides cover for the deeper idea that their struggle is not just linguistic.
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February 22, 2022
The idea is to put us in the uncomfortable position of the character(s). But we’re not in Italy, we’re not in Iran. We’re in a theater, and the feeling communicated is “I could be home watching ‘Jame Jam’ instead.”
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February 22, 2022
Neshat delivers a fascinatingly inscrutable performance as Marjan, a woman who lived in England for a decade, but made the decision to move back to Iran. Contentment layers over regret as Marjan counts her blessings while silently wondering, what if? As in life, there are no clear-cut lessons in English — and that makes it well worth your time.
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February 22, 2022
Sanaz Toossi’s moving new play, English, probes this problem with a sophisticated understanding of the failures of language, and of our own failures in relying so deeply on it for communication. Staged by the Atlantic Theater Company, in a co-production with Roundabout, the one-act work is a masterfully executed look at the impossibility of translating humanity through imperfect means.
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February 22, 2022
Over the course of the play, under Knud Adams’ careful direction, English reveals itself to be an exquisitely crafted production. You get to know a quintet of characters, each complex in different ways, with practically nothing in common save for their shared goal of passing the TOEFL
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