Language has often been seen as one of the distinguishing traits of human beings. Dogs may bark to us as we dangle a treat; whales may sing songs; and a mule may count with its hoof. But few of us think of these noises as conversation. Language — talking and reading — set us apart.
Yet language is not universal. The globe is alive with different languages, and most seldom manage to master more than the one we absorbed as infants and have practiced constantly ever since blurting out, “mama,” “papa,” or, in my house, the dreaded infant “no.” Those who do frequently start doing so as children, and adult second or third language learners struggle like senior citizens climbing Mt. Everest.
It is precisely this effort of adults trying to learn English that forms the heart of Sanaz Toossi’s 2023 Pulitzer Prize winning play, “English,” now on stage at Houston’s Alley Theatre. Four adult Iranian students in Karaj, Iran, come to a simple classroom seeking to become proficient English speakers with the guidance of a teacher who spent nine years in England. The year is 2008—a date decades after the Islamic Revolution but also decades prior to the current relationship between the West and Iran—and all are there for personal reasons: Elham, a medical student who has passed the MCAT to gain admission to a program in Australia but must now pass an English language proficiency exam; Roya, a grandmother who needs the language skills to talk to her Westernized family in Canada where she wants to join them; Goli, a teenager fascinated by American music and culture; and Omid, a young man whose skills already surpass his classmates.
In a series of short scenes—all in the classroom—their anxieties, fears, and hopes solidify before us as their teacher, Marjan, encourages them: “English is not to be conquered. Embrace it,” she tells them. But nothing comes easily. “Still it’s like bees buzzing,” the stressed Elham laments. They all long for what they see as the poetry and beauty of Farsi, their native tongue.
Thanks to an ingenious trick of having the characters speak their lines smoothly when they lapse into Farsi and then using a rough and often broken dialect when trying “English only” as their teacher demands, the play lets audiences see the struggle with words and sounds: the fight to speak the English “W” as in “The wheels on the bus” and “weeping”; the triumph of fishing up a boulder of a term: “alleviate.”
Thus while offering a meditation of language learning, the play gently burrows into the lives of the five characters. Here the strong cast most flexes their talent—particularly Pantea Ommi as the grandmother Roya. She wears her Iranian scarf tightly on her head and armors herself in her clothes. She projects a fortress strategy for coping with anxiety through her body movements and facial gestures as she worries about losing her family to their Western lives as well as losing her beloved and familiar language. Shadee Vossoughi as the medical student Elham is her driven opposite. She explodes under the pressure language acquisition places upon her. She is rough, tough—a person who screams at her peers, “I am nice!”—and combative—“I hate English!” Nima Rakhshanifar as Omid and Jamie Rezanour as their teacher Marjan are the most mysterious; their motives and feelings for English are the most complex, and if the actors don’t clarify those motivations, they convey the fog it leaves their characters in and the missteps it leads them to make. This leaves the task of portraying timidity to Vaneh Assadourian as Goli, the teen-aged student most comfortable with playing CDs and dancing to Western pop tunes. With no clear goals in mind, she is merely experimenting shyly like many a budding young woman. Together, they paint a complex mural of Iranian society as well as suggesting the struggles we all experience finding words for our hopes and fears.
Director Evren Odcikin elects to let the action play out like falling leaves, creating a sense of season, inevitability, and unspoken—maybe unspeakable, at least in English—emotions. She lets the characters be human rather than voices for ideas and positions. If at times, this creates a sense of slowness, it leaves plenty of space for humor and anxiety in the Alley’s smaller, more intimate Neuhaus stage.
At a moment when tensions between the U.S. and Iran are again seething, perhaps English is the kind of calm we need—watching others seek to understand us through the richness of our and their languages.
“English” is on stage at Houston’s Alley Theatre through March 8.
Robert Donahoo is a professor at Sam Houston State University and writes theater reviews for The Courier.