Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of Sanaz Toossi’s English, directed by Knud Adams, open tonight at the Todd Haimes Theatre. Read the reviews!
The Broadway premiere of English features the original cast from the off-Broadway world premiere: Tala Ashe as “Elham,” Ava Lalezarzadeh as “Goli,” Pooya Mohseni as “Roya,” Marjan Neshat as “Marjan,” and Hadi Tabbal as “Omid.”
This Pulitzer Prize – winning comedy unfolds in an Iranian classroom where adult English learners practice for their proficiency exam. As they leapfrog through a linguistic playground, their wildly different dreams, frustrations, and secrets come to light. Can they overcome the limits of language to discover what they really want to say?
Jesse Green, The New York Times: The Broadway transfer of Sanaz Toossi’s “English,” which opened on Thursday at the Todd Haimes Theater, is the consummate consommé. Even more so than when it debuted Off Broadway in 2022, and won the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 2023, it strikes me as a work of uncommon discipline despite its big and occasionally easy laughs. Without ever releasing a tight grip on its theme — or perhaps because of that tight grip — it suggests a world of small tragedies and smaller compensations.
Frank Scheck, New York Stage Review: Sometimes, plays, like people, take a while to grow on you. Such is my experience with Sanaz Toossi’s English, which I first saw in its world premiere at the Atlantic Theatre Company nearly three years ago. At the time, I found the play stubbornly undramatic and narratively inert, even while thinking highly of the performances. Seeing it again on the occasion of its Broadway premiere by the Roundabout Theatre Company, I found it much more thematically complex and moving. (And I swear the fact that the play won the Pulitzer Prize in the meantime had nothing to do with it.)
Roma Torre, New York Stage Review: English, I’m told, is one of the hardest languages to learn. We Americans tend to take it for granted, but with its erratic pronunciations, bizarre contractions and seemingly made-up words, not to mention all the slang, it must be incredibly difficult for foreigners to master our native tongue. And yet for so many people throughout the world, a working knowledge of English is currency to a career, a better life, and even freedom. That’s the backdrop for a group of ESL students studying English in Iran; and as you’d expect, most of them are struggling. Playwright Sanaz Toossi won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for English, a keenly understated work that speaks volumes about the immense impact language has on our culture and identity.
Adam Feldman, Time Out New York: If Toossi’s thoughtful and searching play has things to teach us—about character, culture, postcolonial identity—it does so through immersion. We first see Marjan’s classroom from the outside, through a window. But Marsha Ginsberg’s boxed set soon rotates to invite us inside; it keeps turning throughout the play to give us new angles, and Toossi does the same. Like any grammar, English has rules and structures that it carefully maintains, but enough exceptions and variations to provide character and texture. It unfolds fluently, but not glibly; its choices of word have purpose and care.
Jonathan Mandell, New York Theater: Those awards, and the move now to Broadway, where it’s opening tonight at Roundabout’s Todd Haimes Theater, puts the pressure of heightened expectations on “English.” And, although only three years have passed, we arguably have entered a new era, politically and culturally. The result is that “English,” transferring essentially intact — including the same first-rate cast (all now making their Broadway debuts) – plays differently for me. It’s still a lovely, low-key comedy about learning a second language. It just doesn’t feel as deep as it did in 2022. There is too much left unexplained, too much unsaid.
Gloria Oladipo, The Guardian: English, Sanaz Toossi’s stunning Broadway debut, is a precise study of language’s significance. The 2023 Pulitzer prize winner slyly presents as a comedy about studying a foreign language, but eventually blooms into an evocation of grief and assimilation.
Chris Jones, The New York Daily News: I’ve seen “English” before, in Chicago (it also was seen Off-Broadway at the Atlantic Theatre). The separate Goodman Theatre production had more of a sense of the world outside, to its betterment, and suggested that the classroom wasn’t just a place where you lost yourself but an escape from chaos. But Adams has chosen a rather more ethereal path, scoring the show with emotive piano music and revolving the set in such a way as you feel like these students, and their teacher, are floating in a kind of linguistic netherworld, denying themselves with the prize of getting ahead.
Tim Teeman, The Daily Beast: This critic’s advice is as simple as it was in 2022. Book a ticket right now—an exquisitely written, beautifully acted and mounted one hour and forty-five minutes of theater awaits. At this moment, with immigration—and attacks on immigrants’ rights—at the top of President Trump’s agenda, the play assumes a new, urgent precision.
Greg Evans, Deadline: Absolutely nothing gets lost in the translation of Sanaz Toossi’s English as the Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a group of Iranians longing for the West finally makes its Broadway debut, two years after its Off Broadway bow garnered critical raves and regional stagings won over audiences with its unfailing wit, grace and compassion.
Charles Isherwood, The Wall Street Journal: Crucial to the play’s appeal is the way the relationships between the characters, amiable but distant at first, evolve under the astutely detailed direction of Knud Adams. This is particularly impressive because all the actors played their roles in the play’s off-Broadway debut, and yet the performances still have the bloom of freshness and discovery, in exploring both the characters’ sympathies and antipathies.
Allison Considine, New York Theatre Guide: English begins with a teacher writing the words “English Only” on the whiteboard. These two words set into motion a moving show that wrestles with identity and showcases the chaos and power of communication. In any language, English is a triumph: Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play is a compelling exploration of how language shapes who we are and how we navigate the world.
Average Rating:
84.5%
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