In a small, windowless room in Karaj, Iran, four adults sit around a table and try to fold their tongues into the shape of a future that hasn’t arrived yet. They are chasing the "Test of English as a Foreign Language." They are chasing a score. They are chasing the ability to be heard in a world that currently views them through the sights of a drone or the ink of a sanctions list.
Sanaz Toossi’s play English—which recently made its Los Angeles premiere at the Geffen Playhouse—captures this specific, high-stakes claustrophobia. It is a story about what happens when your native language becomes a cage and a foreign one becomes the only key to the door. For another perspective, read: this related article.
To understand the play, you have to understand the air outside the theater. When English arrived in California, it didn't just bring the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It brought the heavy, suffocating context of a geopolitical storm. As tensions between the United States and Iran reach a fever pitch, with talk of "raining down terror" and shifting military postures, the stage becomes the only place where Iranians are allowed to be humans instead of headlines.
The premise is deceptively simple. It is 2008. Four students are preparing for an exam. Their teacher, Marjan, has one rule: "English Only." Further insight on this trend has been published by Entertainment Weekly.
The Violence of a Vowel
Imagine being told that your mother tongue is a liability.
For the characters in Toossi’s world, Farsi is the language of the heart, of the kitchen, and of the home they might have to leave. English is the language of the professional, the successful, and the "civilized." The play uses a brilliant linguistic trick: when the characters speak Farsi, they speak in perfect, fluid, poetic English. When they attempt to speak English, they struggle. They stumble. They sound like children.
This creates a visceral sense of loss. We see the brilliance of Elham, a competitive student who wants to be a doctor, trapped behind a thick accent and a limited vocabulary. In her own mind, she is a genius. To the world, she is "difficult to understand."
This isn't just about passing a test. It is about the erasure of the self. There is a specific kind of grief in knowing that the person you are in your own language will never be fully translated into the next one. You are losing parts of your soul in the gaps between the grammar rules.
The Shadow of the Passport
The stakes for these characters are not academic. They are existential.
Outside the classroom, the world is shifting. In the real timeline of 2024 and 2025, the pressure on Iran has moved from economic strangulation to the brink of kinetic conflict. Sanctions don't just stop oil; they stop medicine, they stop spare parts for planes, and they stop the movement of people.
For a student like Omid, the only man in the class, English is a bridge to a life where he isn't defined by the passport he carries. But that bridge is guarded by a gatekeeper that demands he sound "less Iranian."
The play captures the "accent" as a political border. If you can speak without a trace of your origin, you are safe. If you can mimic the cadence of a Midwesterner, you might be granted a visa. The characters play games where they try to identify objects in English, and the tension is unbearable because every missed word feels like a brick being added to a wall.
Toossi’s writing avoids the typical tropes of Middle Eastern tragedy. There are no bombs falling on stage. There are no bearded villains. Instead, the "terror" is the slow, quiet realization that the world is closing its doors to you because of where you were born.
The Los Angeles Connection
Bringing this play to Los Angeles is a homecoming of sorts. Southern California is home to "Tehrangeles," the largest population of Iranians outside of Iran. For many in the audience at the Geffen, the struggle on stage isn't a metaphor. It is a memory.
They remember the nights spent memorizing vocabulary. They remember the shame of being told to "speak English" in a grocery store. They remember the agonizing wait for news from home while the news anchors talked about their country as if it were a wasteland waiting to be leveled.
The timing of the production is a provocation. While political rhetoric focuses on "maximum pressure" and military strikes, Toossi focuses on the way a grandmother tries to pronounce the word "apple."
It is a reminder that when we talk about "raining down terror," we are talking about raining it down on people who are currently sitting in classrooms trying to learn how to talk to us. We are talking about people who love Leonard Cohen and Shakira, people who argue about the best way to make tea, and people who are desperately trying to build a life in a world that seems determined to tear it down.
The Cost of the Key
As the play progresses, the "English Only" rule begins to feel like a form of psychological warfare.
Marjan, the teacher, lived in Manchester for years. She has the "perfect" accent. But we see the cost of that perfection. She is a woman caught between two worlds, belonging fully to neither. She uses English as a shield, a way to distance herself from the pain of her home country. But the shield is also a mirror.
One character, Roya, wants to learn English so she can talk to her granddaughter in Canada. Her son has moved away and raised a child who doesn't speak Farsi. For Roya, English isn't a career move; it’s a desperate attempt to keep her family from disappearing into the ether of assimilation.
The tragedy is that by the time she learns the words, the connection might already be severed.
Beyond the Headlines
The news gives us numbers. It gives us maps with red circles and arrows. It gives us "strategic interests" and "national security."
What the news doesn't give us is the sound of a woman crying because she can't remember the English word for "hope."
English forces the audience to sit in that room in Karaj. It forces us to feel the heat, the frustration, and the flickering light of ambition. It suggests that the greatest barrier between nations isn't a physical wall or a naval blockade, but the refusal to hear the humanity in a struggling voice.
The play doesn't offer a happy ending. There is no magic moment where everyone passes the test and moves to a suburban paradise. Instead, there is the reality of the struggle. There is the persistent, stubborn act of trying to be understood in a world that prefers to keep its ears closed.
In the final moments of the Los Angeles production, the silence in the theater is heavy. It is the silence of an audience realizing that the "enemy" is just a group of people in a classroom, terrified of getting a preposition wrong.
The stage light fades on a single face, a person caught in the middle of a sentence, reaching for a word that remains just out of grasp. It is a portrait of a people waiting for the world to stop raining down terror long enough for them to finish their thought.
The word they are looking for isn't in the textbook. It’s "mercy."
It is the one word the world seems least interested in translating.
