← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
Pulitzer Prize-winning Play 'English' Heads to Broadway
00:19:42
The Pulitzer Prize-winning play "English" is now on Broadway.
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WNYC Studios
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Alison Stewart
This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. The Pulitzer Prize winning play English explores how the language we speak can shape the person we are and how that person can change from one language to another. And it's now on Broadway. 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 Guli, doesn't have an immediate plan. Now. In the middle are Omed, who seems to have near native proficiency, and then Elim, 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, Marjane, who has a complicated relationship with the English language. Marjane is played by actor Marjan Neshat Ilam is played by Talat Ashi Ash. Excuse me. They join me in studio. Nice to meet you.
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Marjan Neshat
Nice to meet you.
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Alison Stewart
And joining us on ZOOM is playwright Sanaz Tusi. Hi, Sanaz.
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Sanaz Tusi
Hi. Thank you for having us.
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Alison Stewart
English ran off Broadway in 2022, is now running with its entire original cast. It is running through March 2nd on Broadway. Sanaz, when this play ran in 2022, it was a debut. Now it's on Broadway. The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Dr. Should say, how did that affect your frame of mind going into the Broadway production?
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Sanaz Tusi
You know, when we did this play off Broadway in 2022, it was my first production ever. I had no idea what I was doing. And we did really extensive rewrites on the play like those, you know, Marijan and Tabout can tell you they were getting new pages every day, every night. And when we did it, when we got our first preview, we understood finally that we had a play. And we really didn't know that until up until our very first audience. And then we found the play and the play became ours. And so 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, like, we should be here, and we are here. So we're just trying to enjoy it.
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Alison Stewart
Rajan, how's it felt to make your debut in this show?
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Tala Ash
It's a really amazing experience. You know, 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 like kind of impossible. Like, for me, it felt like impossible. And so it's kind of a dream.
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Alison Stewart
Tala, for you, what do you know about being on Broadway that you didn't know before?
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Marjan Neshat
Everything. You know, it's. We always say, you know, kids dream about being on Broadway, but this specific confluence of events that brought us here is so special. And, you know, I think it's been really important for me to try to show up for it and really kind of 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 Sana's 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. And all of us believe so deeply in what the play has to say and its power of transformation and empathy. And so just being able to put that in front of, you know, 700 people a night is incredible.
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Alison Stewart
Sanaz, the class has four students, each different age, different backgrounds. Which character came first to you and which character came last?
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Sanaz Tusi
It's so funny. The two characters who have always were the first on the page were Marijan and Elham. And I think, you know, there are two. You know, the conflict of the play really lives between the two of them. This idea that language can be, you know, learning a new language can be transformative, and we can be who we want to be through language. And then Elham represents, you know, the other side of that, which is it's actually can be traumatic to leave language behind because language is tied to identity.
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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.
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Marjan Neshat
You should say antagonistic. Antagonistic. You can say it, Marjan.
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Alison Stewart
Why do they have so much trouble connecting you?
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Tala Ash
Know, I think that especially in this production because I think we started with a trust of the play and it instantly sort of went deeper. I think that it really doesn't start out that way. And I think by the end, I think she's more of a foil for me than I realize in terms of, you know, I think they were both at the top of their class. And I think that she is this bright woman with so much possibility. And I see part of myself in her, but I feel like my methodology just like, does not, is just not met. And I think all of these attempts kind of coincide with my character's losing of something of her own. And so I think it's just she has lived so much in teaching and like, all of her hopes and dreams have sort of boiled down to this way of offering this to her students. And 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.
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Alison Stewart
Why is Elham so mad? She's really mad.
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Marjan Neshat
Oh, Alison. She has such righteous anger. Astanas 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. It makes so much sense to me that a young, ambitious, tenacious woman would feel not only angry, but would then, you know, 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. And then she's met with this teacher who, as Marijan said, they kind of keep unintentionally missing each other in terms of communication. And the pedagogy does not work for Elham often to. And she's not good at English. And 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, but yes, often to great comic and humiliating effect. We see her struggling with this language immensely.
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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, Sanuz Tousi, and stars Tala Ash and Marjan Neshat. It runs through March 2. In English, Marjane plays the class teacher.
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Unknown
Who'S also named Marjane Sanouz.
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Alison Stewart
Last time you were on the show, you told us you always wanted her.
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Unknown
Marjane to be in it.
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Alison Stewart
Why did you know Marjane would be right for this role?
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Sanaz Tusi
Oh, I mean, I could talk about this for hours and hours. I've sort of, I've loved Marjan before. We even. She even. We even were even friends, which I hear it now, and I know that sounds really crazy, but we have like, I think we're after the same mystery. I think we like, you know, she loves Chekov more than anyone. And I also love Chekov, but I think we just love like what language can't hold. I think we're all. And maybe this is because we're Iranian. We're obsessed with this, with yearning and longing, which feels, I. I don't know, there's. Which is about romantic and which is about romance, but also things that have been so. I think we've always been. We've shared obsessions and we want to capture. We've always wanted to capture that in art.
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Alison Stewart
Marjane tells the class, I always liked myself better in English. And when you were on the show in 2002, you said you pushed back on that line.
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Tala Ash
Oh my God, a little bit. So part of what I love so much about Sanaz is that we can love each other and really fight it out. You fight it out. Exactly. And I feel like when we fight it out, we get even closer. There were so many times in all of her sort of rigorous rewriting, she would text me that night. She's like, I don't know why I was so resistant, but oftentimes the things that, you know, we double down on it either. She usually ends up being right, sometimes I'm right, and then she gives over to me. And sometimes it takes a long time. But when I first read that line, I was like, I can't say this. Like, I don't want to be a, like a self hating Iranian, you know, I was really, it was really complicated. And she was like, no, you will say it. And I learned in doing it, like, I learned so much with Maryjan that there she is not explainable. And I think that she doesn't. That some of the things that she says and I think this is. 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, you know, the potential. The potential that something can unlock that is not so, like, clearly defined. And so I think it was in living in the sort of in between that I found that character. And so I think she was right, because the reaction it gets, it definitely makes people judge her one way or another. But 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, like, hates everything else, you know, like, people keep accusing her, and I'm like, that's not it. But I'm doing something specific here in this case class. It's not all of me. And so she was right, as usual.
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Alison Stewart
Let's talk about Omid a little bit, Tala. Elim is not a fan of Omid's.
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Unknown
He's nearly proficient.
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Alison Stewart
She gets so mad, she puts little devil horns around his name on a whiteboard. Where does Elim's anger toward Ahmed come from? And do you think she's right?
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Marjan Neshat
Well, I think she has his number early, and that. That is proven in the play that, in fact, she is right.
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Tala Ash
The.
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Marjan Neshat
The vindication is unfortunately not very sweet by that point. Is she right? The anger, Again, I think this sort of goes back to her resentment of English. And, you know, when. When the. The revelation comes out about Omid and what his backstory actually is, I think it. It awakens in her again, this sort of. This resentment that she has to learn this language that, you know, I think it's like 15% of the. The world speaks, but 75% of those people are speaking English. As a second LA, 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. And somehow Omid becomes the representation of all of that incarnate Sanaz.
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Unknown
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 acts are. The actors speak with accents. It takes everybody a minute at the beginning. You're like, wait a minute.
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Alison Stewart
I know what's going on.
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Unknown
And it's genius. First of all, why did this make sense to you as a structure?
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Sanaz Tusi
Well, it made a lot of intuitive sense to me because I grew up bilingual. I grew up speaking to. I grew up speaking Farsi in the house, English outside the house. So I knew, like, I've always known what it I what it meant to be at ease in one language and in discomfort in another. So. And also, like, I. You know, 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. So this was a device I had always, in some way known, had predated this play, obviously, but it was just important, you know, for us to give. The play is called English. You get to hear. You get interiority to these characters. And. Yeah, so that's why we did that.
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Unknown
You know, there are funny moments that come from some of the stilted conversations that you get in English classes. Like, one conversation begins with, hello, what is your favorite color?
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Alison Stewart
That's me.
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Unknown
So anybody could answer 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.
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Tala Ash
I mean, you know, I think we have a really brilliant director who, from the. From day one, was like, you can't ask for the laugh, and you can't, like, make a meal of it. You just have to be trying to communicate. And so I feel like, you know, I don't have the thickest accent, so, you know, I think Tala and Puyo, in that conversation, could speak better to it. But I think the approach always was that they're really trying to have a conversation and they're trying to communicate. And, you know, when you're trying to do something that is not easy for you, think things get communicated, but that 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.
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Marjan Neshat
And then there are moments that are funny because it is funny, and accents are funny. And 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, and the audience just roar. That's something that Elham says. And 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. And what happens in that next moment for Elham is a sort of, you know, tiny little breakdown. And I think there is a kind of implication that it puts on the audience of, like, what? So sorry, what are you laughing at? Exactly. And, you know, yes, accents are funny, but, like, what are you really laughing at?
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Alison Stewart
The final exchange in the play, Sanaz, is between Ilham and Marjan, and it's Spoken in Farsi. Why? Did that make sense to you?
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Sanaz Tusi
Yeah, I love this question. Because it is not rare that after the show audience members will come up to me and either just sort of explicitly demand that subtitles should have been.
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Alison Stewart
Shown or really, oh, I'd have a conversation with them. I think, well, anyway, go ahead.
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Sanaz Tusi
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, like, whatever, let's say an hour 40. We have given American, let's just like to say generally monolingual audiences. We have translated this play for you. This play is for English speaking audiences in many ways. So we gave you an hour and 39 minutes of interiority, of access. And this play is about how painful it is to be outside language. So if you for 30 seconds cannot stand the discomfort of not understanding what people are saying, then I think you missed the whole play. And that's why, like, do not come to me, up to me after the play and ask for that, because I will. I think you weren't with us.
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Alison Stewart
The whole thing is the audience is. You're left wondering. Which puts you in the minds of the people who, the characters in the play. You're like, oh, I understand.
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Marjan Neshat
You got it, Alison.
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Alison Stewart
What'S that like for you, that moment on stage where you get to speak Farsi?
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Marjan Neshat
Oh, my God. We're just trying not to fall apart, I think, every night, every afternoon, every night.
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Tala Ash
I mean, I will say, I think, you know, in this rendition there's also a layer of, I think, acceptance and kindness that comes, that passes between our characters. And I think on some level I chalk that up to growth as human beings. I chalk it up to, you know, the Zanzendagi Aza. Like, just like we've all lived through so much of what has happened to our people. And so the desire to connect, I think is even higher. But there's an understanding. And I think when we face each other and we. I think it feels like I look in her eyes and it's like, it's just somehow like. It's like I'm being unzipped.
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Marjan Neshat
And what we're talking about is the experience is a person that is leaving the country talking to a person who left the country and came back. And it's all impossible and it's all frustrating and it's not the ideal for anyone.
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Alison Stewart
The name of the play is English. It runs through March 2nd. My guests have been Sana Tusi, Marjan.
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Unknown
Neshat and Tala Ashley, Ash, Ash Ash.
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Marjan Neshat
Just Ash.
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Alison Stewart
Tala Ash. Thank you so much for being with us in studio.
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Tala Ash
Thank you, thank you.
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Alison Stewart
And thanks tinaj for being with us on Zoom.
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Sanaz Tusi
Thank you so much.
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Alison Stewart
There's more, all of it on the way. Peter Berg, the director of American Primeval, is next.
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It.