Review: ‘English’ at the Guthrie Theater highlights the anguish of learning a new language
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Tensions build on stage as a class of Iranian adults struggle with their secondary language instructor’s English-only policy.
As the conversation turns to adopting English names, a student stands up and speaks in Farsi: “Our mothers get to name us, not foreigners.”
Now running at the Guthrie Theater, in collaboration with Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, “English” examines the complexities of learning a new language. Audiences follow a group of adults in Iran in 2009 as they prepare to take the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) — a requirement for many visas and immigration applications.
The play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2023, thanks to playwright Sanaz Toossi's witty, well-paced dialogue. On the night I attended, audiences began laughing within the first few minutes.
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An early scene sees high schooler Goli recite the lyrics of Puerto Rican superstar Ricky Martin’s “She Bangs.” Goli, played with optimistic teen spirit by Shadee Vossoughi, attempts to understand why the singer is hung up on what month the subject of the song was born in (“You’re switching signs like a Gemini.”)
Other classroom vignettes include watch parties of Hugh Grant rom-coms and show-and-tell sessions where the characters work on their English skills.
The show is performed in English, but it clues us into what language is being spoken through a clever storytelling device: when a character speaks English, they adopt a Persian accent. When they speak Farsi, they use a generalized North American accent. This is used to great effect to showcase the students’ struggle with the foreign language.
While they all make mistakes in their pronunciation, classroom rebel Elham fights the language the most. In her native Farsi, the grad student is definitive and brilliant, but in English, she doesn’t have the words to express her intricate thoughts. She hopes to continue her education in Australia, but these hopes are at an all-time low — she’s taken and failed the TOEFL five times by the time the play begins.
Elham is played by Nikki Massoud. Her dry and cutting wit gives the character a real fortitude, especially when going toe to toe with the class’s instructor, Marjan. The heated class discussions reveal why people learn a new language — some do it to keep a part of their past alive, some see it as a necessity for their future, and others treat it as a colonizing force.
I’ve muddled my way through a few different foreign language courses and can say that Toossi’s words and director Hamid Dehghani’s staging capture the feeling of a language classroom.
Dehghani is originally from Iran and took classes like the ones on stage. This insight has been invaluable for this production of “English,” as I was transported back into a Russian language lesson — and all the terrors and joys that came with it.
Towards the beginning of the play, a character describes the difference between the two languages featured in the show: “English does not want to be poetry like Farsi.”
This may be true of the English language, but “English” — the play — sings with humor and a moving depiction of what you gain with a new language, and what you lose.
