Theater review: Guthrie’s excellent ‘English’ eloquently addresses language and identity

“This is not how people talk. They talk about things with meaning.”

So says a character early in “English,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Sanaz Toossi currently receiving its Twin Cities premiere on the Guthrie Theater’s proscenium stage. And she’s right that she and her fellow students of English are being asked to learn seemingly insignificant small talk. But, by the end of the show’s intermission-less 95 minutes, they’ve indeed talked about very important things.

Such as how the way you speak and the language you use to express yourself play into your personal identity. And how a new language can help you achieve your life goals but leave you grieving a loss from which you may never recover.

“English” is exceptionally eloquent in exploring these ideas, and the Guthrie’s production — which recently completed a run at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre — is not only a captivating character study built around five outstanding performances, but also full of insight and questions that should spark many a post-performance conversation.

The setting is a classroom in the Iranian city of Karaj in 2009. There, four adults are gathered with their teacher to master the English language enough to pass an important exam that could open up fresh avenues for them. Roya wishes to communicate with her Canadian granddaughter, Elham to attend medical school in Australia, and Omid and Goli to get their green cards for work opportunities elsewhere.

Instructing them is Marjan, an Iranian woman who lived in England for nine years and seems deeply in love with the language. Her philosophy is that only English should be spoken in the classroom, and she enforces it with a demerit system that causes friction and leads to charges of favoritism and that she disrespects Iran’s culture and language.

Many of the play’s most important exchanges take place in the Persian language of Farsi, but “English” doesn’t use supertitles for translation. Instead, the students break from their halting, searching-for-words English and suddenly fall into smoothly-spoken American accents, communicating in disarmingly natural fashion.

Nikki Massoud (Elham), Shadee Vossoughi (Goli), Pej Vahdat (Omid) and Roxanna Hope Radja (Marjan) in a scene from “English.” Four Iranians encounter the ramifications of learning to speak English from their teacher (Roxanna Hope Radja) in the Guthrie Theater’s production of Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “English,” which is being presented at the Minneapolis theater through Aug. 18, 2024. (Liz Lauren / Guthrie Theater)

It proves a wonderfully imaginative device for playwright Toossi, for the audience is given to see and hear how an individual can seem two completely different people when trying to speak two different languages.

“English” is an excellent play that blends believable conflicts within this pressure-cooker classroom with plenty of humor that always respects the life experiences of these sharply drawn characters.

Roxanna Hope Radja is a complex and conflicted Marjan, both encouraging and authoritarian, but ultimately more vulnerable than she wishes to let on. As her chief antagonist, Elham, Nikki Massoud gives a powerful performance, saying volumes more with her dark and stormy eyes than her English will allow.

No one conveys the split personality that language proficiency can create more brilliantly than Sahar Bibiyan as Roya, who seems painfully shy when trying to speak English but proves the most forceful person in the room in Farsi. Also bearing intriguing complexity is Pej Vahdat as Omid, the most accomplished English speaker among the students. And Shadee Vossoughi’s Goli represents well the perspective of a younger student observing these conflicts.

Courtney O’Neill’s set enhances the drama well, contrasting the sterility of a modern classroom with big bay windows that open out onto a closely crowded city that mixes old and new architecture. It underlines that there’s a darker flipside to that cliche of encouragement, “When one door closes, another opens.” “English” reminds us that it also works the other way: When you open one door, another might be closing behind you.

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