Sanaz Toossi doesn’t know quite how to feel when we speak in early November. On the one hand, the 33-year-old playwright’s fleet and heartfelt drama English—about a group of people (parents, students, young professionals) preparing to take the Test of English as a Foreign Language, or TOEFL, in Iran in 2008—will open on Broadway in January. Acclaimed during its 2022 run at the Linda Gross Theater in Manhattan, the piece, which snatched up the Pulitzer Prize in 2023, will once again be directed by Knud Adams, and star Marjan Neshat, Tala Ashe, Hadi Tabbal, Pooya Mohseni, and Ava Lalezarzadeh, all of them making their Broadway debuts.
“I hate when we use the word family in theater, but I do make an exception for them,” Toossi tells me of that group. Funny, contemplative, and rather glamorous, she tells me that her cast is “just the most beautiful, generous, extraordinary group of artists that I’ve ever worked with.” Neshat says that after the curtain came down on their final performance off-Broadway, “we all sat in our dressing room and wept for hours. We were so connected to that play.”
Still, the presidential election—not yet a week behind us—has unnerved Toossi a little. Years ago an early version of English served as part of her graduate thesis at New York University, hewed from her outrage at Donald Trump’s Islamophobic visa restrictions when he first took office. (The daughter of Iranian immigrants, Toossi grew up speaking Farsi at home in Orange County, California, and visiting Iran in the summer.) That the play should be heading to Broadway just as Trump returns to the White House is, in a word, bewildering to her. “I don’t know what it means that those of us onstage and behind the scenes get to be experiencing what I think is a big career achievement, while the very people we’re representing are being villainized and dehumanized,” Toossi says. “I don’t know how to talk about that.” Indeed, having recently moved into a new apartment in Brooklyn, she is grateful, at the moment, for a task as pleasantly anodyne as unpacking boxes. “No mental engagement has been really soothing,” she says, laughing dryly. “I’m really enjoying it.”
But make no mistake: There is nothing ponderous or overtly political about English. The show is much sweeter, funnier, and plainly more human than that, taking as its principal subject the mortifying ordeal of trying to make yourself understood in a foreign language. Toossi cannot bear the idea that “people would come see our play and pat themselves on the back” because of where it’s set. “I promise you, I’m not going to teach you anything,” she says. “See our play because it’s a good time.”
Both Adams and Neshat recall the thrill of their first off-Broadway preview. “It felt like inviting 200 people into your living room,” Adams says, “but from the first scene, they were just dying of laughter, hooked into the story immediately.” Adds Neshat: “I think we all walked offstage thinking, Not only do we have a play, but I think they’re experiencing the play that we wanted to put forward.”
Now that they know the show works—with a flurry of well-regarded regional productions in the intervening years to prove it—the group’s challenge, as they ready their move to 42nd Street, is to maintain, over the course of its three-month run, that magic something that made English sing in 2022. “The first time we did this play, we closed our eyes, held hands, and we just leapt,” Toossi says. Up and over they go again.
In this story: hair and makeup, Karen Sloan, Face Time Beauty.