Performance Review: ENGLISH. Written by Sanaz Toossi

Under the steady yet imaginative direction of Naghmeh Samini, Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play English takes on a life that is both rooted in realism and lifted by metaphor. In this Seattle staging, co-produced by ArtsWest and the Seda Iranian Theatre Ensemble, the story’s intimate frame belies the breadth of its implications. The premise is deceptively simple: in 2008, in Karaj—a cosmopolitan city near Tehran—four adult students gather for a TOEFL^[1] (preparation class. They come from different walks of life, each carrying personal stakes in mastering English, and are guided by their teacher, Marjan (Vahishta Vafadari), who enforces a strict “English Only” policy. While for many, learning a second language may be a path to personal growth or even a leisure pursuit, for these characters—like many English learners around the world—it is neither optional nor casual, but a vital necessity. Over six weeks of lessons, shown through a series of short blackout scenes, we watch them struggle with vocabulary, accents, and the cultural weight the English language carries. What unfolds is more than a comedy of miscommunication; it is a layered exploration of identity, belonging, and the uneasy compromises of assimilation.

The classroom is both a literal and symbolic space, where the students’ lives intersect for a brief time, where the rules are clear, but the emotional terrain is anything but. Elham (Shereen Khatibloo), brimming with ambition and impatience, has her sights set on medical school in Australia, and passing this English test is the key to her dream. Competitive and blunt, she is visibly frustrated whenever her English falters. Goli (Newsha Farahani), just eighteen, has no specific plan; she is here simply because she loves English, loves the way it makes her feel, and trusts it will be essential for her future. Roya (Janet Hayatshahi), the eldest, has a deeply personal reason: her son in Canada insists she learn English before she can spend meaningful time with her granddaughter. Omid (Emon Elboudwarej), the only man in the class, is already nearly fluent, claiming to be brushing up for a green card interview, though his ease with the language suggests other, unspoken motivations. Presiding over them all is Marjan, who has returned to Iran after nine years in Manchester. Charismatic yet guarded, she enforces her “English Only” rule with conviction, and seems, perhaps, more devoted to the language itself than to any formal curriculum.

From the moment she writes those two words— “English Only”—on the board, the play’s central tensions are set in motion. The rule is meant to immerse the students fully in the language, but it also forces them to abandon the comfort and poetry of their mother tongue. Toossi’s ingenious device removes the need for subtitles: when the characters are speaking their native Persian, the actors use fluent, everyday American English; when they are speaking “English” in class, they adopt a Persian accent, slow their delivery, stumble over grammar, and lose their eloquence. Under Samini’s direction—herself a recent immigrant to the United States—and with a cast composed mostly of Iranian-American actors, this linguistic shift is executed with precision and complete believability. The change is immediate and intuitive; the audience feels the strain of halting, accented speech and the relief of slipping back into the fluidity of one’s native language. In less skilled hands, the device might feel forced, but here it is seamless—an organic extension of the story, and a testament to both Toossi’s writing and the performers’ craft.

Samini honors the realism of Toossi’s structure while layering it with visual and symbolic flourishes. Parmida Ziaei’s simple yet effective set design treats chairs as more than functional classroom props: they are stacked, suspended, and rearranged to suggest instability, aspiration, and confinement. In one especially memorable scene, this departure from stark realism—so characteristic of many Persian plays, including Samini’s own work—reaches its height. As Marjan recalls her memories of England, the classroom chairs are transformed into bus seats, making her recollection physically tangible for the audience. Throughout the production, many props are left to the imagination: a blackboard whose writing appears projected on the back wall, an invisible ball passed around in a vocabulary game, an unseen speaker playing a Ricky Martin song. Their absence draws the audience into the act of creation, inviting them to complete the world of the play in their own minds.

The classroom emerges in a cold gray-blue palette: the stage opens on rows of blue-gray plastic chairs, soon occupied by characters dressed in varying shades of the same muted spectrum. Only Marjan, the teacher, breaks the monotony—her yellow clothing standing out as a visual marker of someone distinct, someone who has lived beyond the confines of this world. Chih-Hung Shao’s lighting design deepens the atmosphere, using flickering fluorescents to signal scene changes and to underscore the drabness of the setting. The light is often cool, creating a sense of distance and uncertainty, but it warms in rare, fleeting moments of connection. Alongside Shao’s work, Andi Villegas’ sound design reinforces this starkness, keeping the aural world spare and purposeful. Ziaei’s costumes ground the characters in contemporary Iranian streetwear while subtly reflecting their personalities. The play’s music is equally restrained, chosen to serve the text rather than dominate it. When Roya plays a Persian song—unspecified in the script—the selection fits her generation and taste perfectly, while also recalling the “yellow color of amber,” Marjan’s favorite, mentioned in a line of poetry within the piece.

The episodic nature of the play mirrors the rhythms of a real classroom: the repetition of drills, the gradual building of trust, the small ruptures that occur when personalities clash. There is no single climactic event; instead, meaning accumulates through games, confessions, and quiet acts of defiance. Some threads are left unresolved. As in a real classroom, the characters avoid fully revealing their feelings, motivations, and secrets, yet each one follows their own personal arc throughout the show, which often remains unfinished and unresolved for the audience. The cast navigates Toossi’s linguistic landscape with precision.

Vafadari’s Marjan is a portrait of contradictions—warm yet exacting, nostalgic yet pragmatic. She reveals only fragments of her past: a life in England where she went by “Mary,”^[2] a version of herself she liked better, because “small sacrifices,” like anglicizing a name, “can open our world.”^[3] Her insistence on an “English Only” policy is not just a teaching method but also a shield, a way of maintaining control and protecting the identity she cultivated abroad. When challenged—particularly by Elham—her calm exterior can fracture, exposing both vulnerability and the subtle prejudices absorbed from years of living under the gaze of another culture. Though she delights in the English language, in Hollywood movies, and even in “American Coca-Cola,”^[4] the play never discloses why she abandoned her life in England to return to Iran. Her quiet connection with Omid remains unspoken, and her marriage is left entirely offstage. By the end, disillusioned with teaching adults—most of whom aspire to emigrate, a path she once took and then reversed—she turns instead to teaching beginner courses for children.

Khatibloo’s Elham is the live wire of the class—sharp-tongued, quick to challenge, and just as quick to conceal her vulnerabilities. Her confidence bristles on the surface, but beneath it lies a deep frustration. In private, she admits she has failed the TOEFL multiple times, a moment of raw candor that reframes her bluster as a form of self-defense. Khatibloo ensures Elham never tips into caricature; her pride and her shame are equally vivid, each fueling the other. Headstrong and restless, Elham shifts constantly between combative energy and moments of visible overwhelm as she wrestles with the English language. She resents the way it makes her sound—like an idiot, as she bluntly puts it^[5]—when she knows she is anything but. It’s a sentiment many immigrants, perhaps even Marjan herself, have felt: the sense that, in a new country, the language barrier obscures vast parts of who you are, stripping away wit, intelligence, and nuance until you appear diminished in the eyes of others. “I have this amazing dream sometimes that the Persian Empire kept growing,”^[6] Elham confides, savoring the idea that one day American and British children might have to learn Persian to join the global conversation. But she knows it’s only a fantasy; the linguistic war has long since been won, and, as Marjan tells the class, to be success now you need to “forget your Iranian-ness.”^[7] Elham does eventually manage to achieve a passing TOEFL score, but her victory is hollow. She still hates English, and her earlier conversation with Roya lingers as a warning about her future. “You’re very smart, Elham, but you’re very rude. In Farsi, you balance yourself out. But wherever you land, you’re going to have quite a hard time adjusting. Because in English, you won’t have redeeming qualities.”^[8] It’s a harsh truth, and one Elham seems unwilling—or perhaps unable—to accept.

Farahani’s Goli is a burst of youthful optimism. She claims to love English because it is less poetic than Farsi, but her speech betrays her: she cannot help speaking in metaphor, likening English to rice that floats rather than sinks^[9]. Farahani captures the contradiction of someone who believes she is practical but is, in fact, deeply romantic. She represents a younger generation that is fascinated by Western culture and optimistically tries to adapt to it as much as possible. Although she remains a member of the class until the end, the play does not tell us whether she passes the exam or not.

Hayatshahi’s Roya is the emotional anchor of the play. Her goal is simple—to be with her family—but the conditions attached to that dream make it bittersweet. In one of the most devastating scenes, she plays two voicemails from her son: one in English, clipped and formal; the other in Farsi, warm and affectionate. “Do you hear how much more soft he is in his mother tongue?”^[10] she asks, revealing how language can shape not just communication, but personality, intimacy, and even love. Her English is the weakest in the class—she cannot pronounce her grandson’s name, and her progress is painfully limited to counting numbers and naming a few colors. Yet she understands perfectly the difference between “visiting” and “living” when her son uses those words to describe her visit to Canada, and that understanding cuts deep. Midway through the play, disheartened by this realization, she leaves the class, her hopes of reuniting with her son’s family quietly unraveling.

Elboudwarej’s Omid is charming yet elusive. His fluency sets him apart from the rest of the class, but that same ease with the language also isolates him. He flirts lightly with Marjan, lingers after lessons, and watches English romantic comedies with her, yet a quiet guardedness keeps him from ever fully revealing himself. His presence disrupts the classroom’s balance, adding layers to Marjan’s otherwise firm authority. His true reasons for enrolling are never stated outright. As a U.S. resident, he occupies a liminal space, searching for a sense of belonging he cannot seem to find in either America or Iran. When news of his sudden marriage surfaces, it provokes Marjan’s anger, and she expels him—ostensibly because his language skills far exceed the class level, but also, perhaps, because his departure reopens wounds she has tried hard to keep closed.

English resists offering a neat moral about the worth of learning the language. For Marjan, it represents self-expansion; for Roya, it is a wedge driven between generations. For Elham, it is both a path forward and a daily humiliation. For Goli, it remains a playful tool, and for Omid, a reminder of his perpetual in-betweenness. Samini allows each of these perspectives to stand on its own, resisting any impulse to elevate one over the others. In doing so, she captures the messy truth of a world in which English can be both a key and a colonizer. For some, the absence of resolution may feel like a shortcoming; for others, it will ring true to life, where many stories end mid-sentence.

The final moments are among the most powerful. Marjan and Elham speak to each other in Farsi, and for the first time, the English-speaking audience is shut out. It is a small but potent reversal: a reminder of the privacy and completeness of one’s own language, and of the exclusion that comes when you do not share it. It reframes all that has come before, casting the “English Only” rule in a harsher light.

English is not without its flaws. The pacing, while steady, can verge on monotony; there are stretches where the rhythm remains so uniform that the tension flattens, moments that might have been enlivened by sharper bursts of energy or, conversely, deepened by longer silences. Certain character arcs feel underdeveloped, most notably Omid’s, and the quietly suggested romance between him and Marjan, which never moves beyond hints and glances. There is also an inconsistency in the cast’s command of Persian—a detail that, while perhaps unnoticed by most, becomes particularly jarring for audience members like myself who speak the language. This is most evident in the final moments when Marjan and Elham speak in Farsi together; for me as a Persian audience member, the uneven fluency did pull focus from the emotional weight of the scene. The deliberate choice to avoid overt political commentary—beyond fleeting references to the difficulty of securing U.S. visas for Iranians—aligns with the play’s thematic emphasis on the personal and the intimate. Yet this restraint also leaves certain dramatic possibilities untapped. In a work so deeply attuned to the cultural and emotional stakes of language, one senses there is room to push further into the realities that shape those stakes. Still, these shortcomings remain minor within the larger fabric of the piece. At its core, English is about what cannot be fully translated: our humor, our tenderness, our anger, our sense of self. It is a reminder that language can open doors, but it can also leave parts of us locked away, sometimes forever.

Samini’s direction is attentive to the smallest details: the way a character exhales before speaking, the flicker of recognition when a word lands just right, the slump of shoulders when meaning slips away. The ensemble works as a true unit, each performance distinct yet in harmony with the others. The design elements—set, lighting, costume, sound—are cohesive, each reinforcing the themes without overwhelming them. The symbolic flourishes never feel imposed; they grow naturally from the text, deepening its resonance. What lingers after the play ends is not a single image or line, but a web of impressions: Roya’s voice breaking as she talks about her son, Elham’s stubborn set of the jaw, Goli’s laughter spilling into the air, Omid’s easy charm masking something unsaid, Marjan’s wistful confession that she liked herself better in English. These moments accumulate into a portrait of people caught between languages, between selves, between worlds. English is, in the end, about more than the acquisition of a second language. It is about what we gain in translation and what we lose; about the selves we become in another tongue and the selves we leave behind. In Samini’s hands, it is also about the shared human desire to be understood, and the costs—emotional, cultural, personal—of achieving that understanding. This production invites us to sit in the discomfort of that exchange, to recognize the beauty and the pain of it, and to leave the theatre hearing our own language, whatever it may be, a little differently.