[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All of It. I'm Alison Stewart. The Pulitzer Prize-winning play, English, explores how language we speak can shape the person we are, how that person can change from one language to another, and now it's on Broadway until March 2nd. English centers on an English class in an Iranian town. The four students are preparing to take the test of English as a foreign language, AKA the TOEFL.

Each character has a very different reason for being in the class and a very different relationship with the English language. The oldest, Roya, plans to move to Canada with her son and his family. The youngest of the group, a teenager named Goli, doesn't have an immediate plan. In the middle are Omid, who seems to have a near native proficiency, and then Elham, who is accepted into a competitive medical program in Australia, but only if she passes the TOEFL, which she's already taken five times. At the head of the class, their teacher, Marjan, who has a complicated relationship with the language.

Marjan is played by actor Marjan Neshat, Elham is played by Tala Ashe, and they joined me in studio earlier this year alongside playwright Sanaz Toossi, who was with us by Zoom. English is now running on Broadway with its entire original cast running through March 2nd. I started by asking Sanaz about how her play winning a Pulitzer Prize affected her frame of mind going into the Broadway production.

Sanaz Toossi: When we did this play off-Broadway in 2022, it was my first production ever. I had no idea what I was doing. We did really extensive rewrites on the play, like those-- Marjan and Tala can tell you they were getting new pages every day, every night.

When we did it, when we got our first preview, we understood finally that we had a play. We really didn't know that up until our very first audience. Then we found the play and the play became ours. To have it be on Broadway is really dizzying, but it was terrifying at first. I loved our run off-Broadway so much, but I don't know, I just keep saying we should be here and we are here. We're just trying to enjoy it.

Alison Stewart: Marjan, how's it felt to make your debut in this show?

Marjan Neshat: It's a really amazing experience. I was talking to someone about the fact that, of course, I, as an actor, dreamed of being on Broadway, but to be on Broadway in a play that I love, with a cast that I love, to actually get to be on Broadway and do intimate, funny, interesting, beautiful work, feels impossible. For me, it felt impossible. It's kind of a dream.

Alison Stewart: Tala, for you, what do you know about being on Broadway that you didn't know before?

Tala Ashe: Everything. We always say kids dream about being on Broadway, but this specific confluence of events that brought us here is so special. I think it's been really important for me to try to show up for it and really have a beginner's mind to it, because I am indeed a beginner in this, even though I have been acting for a long time, and even though, as Sanaz mentioned, it was kind of terrifying to think about bringing it back to the world when we had such a magical experience the first time.

I think what has been so sustaining for me and gratifying for me is that we get to share it with more people. All of us believe so deeply in what the play has to say and its power of transformation and empathy. Just being able to put that in front of 700 people a night is incredible.

Alison Stewart: Sanaz, the class has four students, each different age, different backgrounds. Which character came first to you and which character came last?

Sanaz Toossi: It's so funny. The two characters who were the first on the page were Marjan and Elham. The conflict of the play really lives between the two of them, this idea that learning a new language can be transformative, and we can be who we want to be through language. Then Elham represents the other side of that, which is it's actually can be traumatic to leave language behind because language is tied to identity.

Alison Stewart: Marjan and Elham, they have a-- I don't want to say it's an antagonistic relationship, but, boy, they push each other's buttons.

[laughter]

Sanaz Toossi: You could say antagonistic. Antagonistic, you can say it.

Alison Stewart: Marjan, why do they have so much trouble connecting?

Marjan Neshat: I think that especially in this production, because I think we started with a trust of the play, and it instantly went deeper, I think that it really doesn't start out that way. I think by the end, I think she's more of a foil for me than I realize in terms of-- I think they were both at the top of their class. I think that she is this bright woman with so much possibility.

I see part of myself in her, but I feel like my methodology is just not met. I think all of these attempts coincide with my character's losing something of her own. I think it's just she has lived so much in teaching, and all of her hopes and dreams have boiled down to this way of offering this to her students. I think as the play goes on and as the offer is just either not well met or rejected or misunderstood, it starts to question the way that she's doing things.

Alison Stewart: Why is Elham so mad? She's really mad.

Marjan Neshat: Oh, Alison, she has such righteous anger. Sanaz and I talk about this righteous anger. This isn't in the play, but knowing what I know about Iran in 2008, which is when the play is set, the socioeconomic situation, the political situation, it makes so much sense to me that a young, ambitious, tenacious woman would feel not only angry, but would then want to pursue higher education elsewhere, but feel very frustrated that English is the barrier to entry and this exam is the barrier to entry. She has failed it. She is used to being the best person in the class.

Then she's met with this teacher who, as Marjan said, they keep unintentionally missing each other in terms of communication. The pedagogy does not work for Elham often. She's not good at English. That is really frustrating. For someone who is usually very good at things, to be bad, not only bad but to feel like she is not herself and that she feels, she says in the play, "I feel like an idiot," that is incredibly demoralizing and angering. I think the first emotion she goes to is anger, which, as we all know, under that is great sadness.

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Marjan Neshat: Often to great comic and humiliating effect, we see her struggling with this language immensely.

Alison Stewart: The Pulitzer Prize-winning play, English, about a class in Iran learning English as a second language, is now on Broadway. I'm speaking to its playwright, Sanaz Toossi, and stars Tala Ashe and Marjan Neshat. It runs through March 2nd. In English, Marjan plays the class teacher who's also named Marjan, Sanaz. Last time you were on the show, you told us you always wanted her, Marjan, to be in it. Why did you know Marjan would be right for this role?

Sanaz Toossi: Oh, I could talk about this for hours and hours. I've loved Marjan before. We were even friends, which I hear it now, and I know that sounds really crazy. I think we're after the same mystery. I think she loves Chekhov more than anyone. I also love Chekhov, but I think we just love what language can't hold. Maybe this is because we're Iranian. We're obsessed with yearning and longing, which is about romance, but also things that have been lost. I think we've shared obsessions and we have always wanted to capture that in art.

Alison Stewart: Marjan tells the class, "I always liked myself better in English." When you were on the show in 2002, you said you pushed back on that line-

Marjan Neshat: Oh my God.

Alison Stewart: -a little bit.

Marjan Neshat: Part of what I love so much about Sanaz is that we can love each other and really--

Alison Stewart: Fight it out?

Marjan Neshat: We fight it out, exactly. I feel like when we fight it out, we get even closer. There were so many times in all of her rigorous rewriting, she would text me that night. She's like, "I don't know why I was so resistant." Oftentimes, the things that we double down on, she usually ends up being right. Sometimes I'm right. Then she gives over to me, and sometimes it takes a long time.

When I first read that line, I was like, "I can't say this. I don't want to be a self-hating Iranian." It was really complicated. She was like, "No, you will say it." In doing it, I learned so much with Marjan that she is not explainable. I think that some of the things that she says, and I think there's so much that comes across with Elham. She picks it up literally. It's not actually literally that. It's like the possibility of things, the potential that something can unlock that is not so clearly defined.

I think it was in living in the in-between that I found that character. I think she was right because the reaction it gets, it definitely makes people judge her one way or another. I think the play also shows so many different facets of her that, hopefully by the end, you realize it's not just one thing, that it's not she just hates everything else. People keep accusing her, and I'm like, "That's not it." I'm doing something specific here in this class. It's not all of me. She was right, as usual.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about Omid a little bit. Tala, Elham is not a fan of Omid's. He's nearly proficient. She gets so mad, she puts little devil horns around his name on a whiteboard. Where does Elham's anger toward Omid come from? Do you think she's right?

Tala Ashe: I think she has his number early, and that is proven in the play, that in fact, she is right. The vindication is unfortunately not very sweet by that point. Is she right? The anger, again, I think this goes back to her resentment of English. When the revelation comes out about Omid and what his backstory actually is, I think it awakens in her again, this resentment that she has to learn this language that I think it's like 15% of the world speaks, but 75% of those people are speaking English as a second language.

She resents that she has to leave her country and say goodbye. When I think about what Elham is really struggling with, and to go back to your initial question about anger, to have to say goodbye to your country that you love and this language that you love, that is angering and a real heartbreak for her. Somehow Omid becomes the representation of all of that incarnate.

Alison Stewart: Sanaz, when the characters are speaking Farsi in the play, the actors actually speak fluent English, but when the characters are learning and speaking English, the actors speak with accents. It takes everybody a minute. At the beginning, you're like, "Wait a minute. I know what's going on." It's genius. First of all, why did this make sense to you as a structure?

Sanaz Toossi: It made a lot of intuitive sense to me because I grew up bilingual. I grew up speaking Farsi in the house, English outside the house. I've always known what it meant to be at ease in one language and in discomfort in another. You watch Anna Karenina and they're speaking in British accents, and so you intuitively understand that those people would be speaking Russian, but they're not. This was a device I had always, in some way, known, had predated this play, obviously, but it was just important for us to give-- the play's called English. You get interiority to these characters. That's why we did that.

Alison Stewart: There are funny moments that come from some of the stilted conversations that you get in English classes. One conversation begins with, "Hello, what is your favorite color?"

Sanaz Toossi: That's me.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Anybody could answer to this. How did you approach finding humor in the way the characters speak to each other without making their accents a punchline? Who wants to take that? You want to take it, Marjan?

Marjan Neshat: I think we have a really brilliant director, who from day one, was like, "You can't ask for the laugh and you can't make a meal of it. You just have to be trying to communicate."

Alison Stewart: Smart.

Marjan Neshat: I feel like I don't have the thickest accent. I think Tala and Pooya in that conversation could speak better to it. I think the approach always was that they're really trying to have a conversation and they're trying to communicate. When you're trying to do something that is not easy for you, things get communicated. The insistence was always on that and not to make it a joke and not to make fun of them in any way, but really push that through.

Tala Ashe: Then there are moments that are funny because it is funny and accents are funny. Yet I think what the play does so cleverly is there's one laugh I'm thinking of in the play that happens at my expense. The audience just roars at something that Elham says. I, as the actor, am feeling not only the humiliation of the moment in the classroom, but I'm feeling the humiliation of being laughed at by the audience. What happens in that next moment for Elham is a tiny little breakdown. I think there is a kind of implication that it puts on the audience of, "Sorry, what are you laughing at exactly?" Yes, accents are funny, but what are you really laughing at?

Alison Stewart: The final exchange in the play, Sanaz, is between Elham and Marjan, and it's spoken in Farsi. Why? Did that make sense to you?

Sanaz Toossi: I love this question, because it is not rare that after the show, audience members will come up to me and either just explicitly demand that subtitles should have been shown.

Alison Stewart: Really? I'd have a conversation with them, I think. Anyway, go ahead.

Sanaz Toossi: I can't have that conversation with them. I get too prickly about it because I think if we have-- our runtime is, I think, whatever, let's say an hour, 40. We have given American, let's just say generally, monolingual audiences. We have translated this play for you. This play is for English-speaking audiences in many ways.

We gave you an hour and 39 minutes of interiority, of access. This play is about how painful it is to be outside your language. If you, for 30 seconds, cannot stand the discomfort of not understanding what people are saying, then I think you missed the whole play. That's why do not come up to me after the play and ask for that, because I will-- I think it means you weren't with us.

Alison Stewart: The whole thing is the audience is you're left wondering, which puts you in the minds of the characters in the play. You're like, "Oh, I understand."

Marjan Neshat: You got it, Alison.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: What's that like for you, that moment on stage where you get to speak Farsi?

Marjan Neshat: Oh my God. We're just trying not to fall apart, I think, every afternoon, every night.

Tala Ashe: I will say, and I think in this rendition, there's also a layer of, I think, acceptance and kindness that passes between our characters. I think on some level, I chalk that up to growth as human beings. I chalk it up to the Zan, Zendegi, Azadi. We've all lived through so much of what has happened to our people. The desire to connect, I think, is even higher, but there's an understanding. I think when we face each other, I look in her eyes and it's just somehow, it's like I'm being unzipped. What we're talking about is a person that is leaving the country talking to a person who left the country and came back. It's all impossible and it's all frustrating and it's not the ideal for anyone.

Alison Stewart: That was playwright, Sanaz Toossi, and stars, Tala Ashe and Marjan Neshat, seaking about the Broadway debut of the Pulitzer Prize play English. It's running through March 2nd. The show is at the Todd Haynes Theater.