In our popular media no less than our politics, the Middle East is a site of conflict, trauma and terrorism. Even in narratives that are sympathetic and relatively nuanced, or which diagnose the region’s problems as deriving from Western colonial and post-colonial incursions, the focus is relentlessly on the agonies of war and migration. That is, when the region or its peoples are portrayed or considered at all.
So there is more than one reason to celebrate the arrival of “English,” Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer-winning play about a language class in Iran, at the Roundabout Theatre on Broadway. For one, New York theaters are hardly teeming with shows about the Middle East. (The Disney romp “Aladdin,” literally playing across the street, definitely doesn’t count.) And Toossi’s tender, thoughtful comedy, with an entirely Iranian American cast, is pointedly not set in a war zone. Though she has said she wrote it in response to the first Trump administration’s “Muslim ban,” it is not a screed or a polemic.
It is all the more powerful in its indirection. Set in 2008, a year before Iran’s Green Revolution, “English” follows four students in a class prepping for the TOEFL, the Test of English as a Foreign Language, as they are led through their paces by the quietly firm Marjan (Marjan Neshat). Each has a different reason for studying the language: The stubborn Elham (Tala Ashe) needs it to be accepted to an Australian university; young Goli (Ava Lalezarzadeh) is hoping to broaden her college choices; stately Roya (Pooya Mohseni) wants to go to Canada to live with her son and his family; and well-spoken Omid (Hadi Tabbal) ostensibly has a green card interview coming up.
The conflict and comedy at first arises out of misunderstanding and mispronunciation, but soon deepens across divides of generation, class and aspiration. The biggest divide, though, is language, and the play walks this tightrope deftly, under director Knud Adams: When the characters speak their native Farsi, they talk fast and fluently, in contemporary American parlance; when they speak English in the class, it is in invisible quotation marks, along a continuum of accents and awkwardness. Even Omid, whose English is suspiciously advanced, speaks it with a stilted superficiality.
Marjan, the tireless teacher, likewise has a kind of determined formality and cheeriness when speaking English—which is nearly all the time, as she continually urges her class to drop the Farsi. Her mounting exasperation with her students soon cracks open into stinging doubt and vulnerability, as she confronts the questions of identity and expression raised by her teaching, and which course under the surface of Toossi’s play.
Early on, Marjan tells her class, “You can be all the things you are in Farsi in English, too.” She eventually comes to question that easy equivalence. In a moving late scene with Omid, with whom she shares a bittersweet, unspoken flirtation, she vents a little. “My English, my Farsi—these two languages, they war in my head,” she says. “And the Farsi is winning. Do you know sometimes I think you can only speak one language? You can know two but…”
Toossi’s signature move throughout is to break the ice with laughter, then give us something to chew on. When Goli brings in the Ricky Martin hit “She Bangs,” she memorably interprets the slang of the lyrics with baffled innocence. Then blunt Elham opens a can of worms, honing in Ricky Martin’s accented English and critiquing each of her classmates’ accents in turn. (She’s no easier on herself; earlier she calls her own accent “a war crime,” which gives you some idea of Toossi’s unbound sense of humor.)
The play executes that same pivot, from bubbly humor to thorny drama, across its intermissionless 100 minutes. It finally gives way to wounded solidarity among its two leading antagonists, who speak the play’s conclusion, at last, in un-subtitled Farsi. There are no actual war crimes depicted here, but the sense of loss is no less wrenching.
The loss depicted in Khawla Ibraheem’s “A Knock on the Roof,” a spare solo show that similarly seeks to interweave comedy and drama, now playing at New York Theater Workshop, is more starkly literal. It tells the story of Mariam, a mother in Gaza during the 2014 war with Israel, as she prepares for the inevitable bombing of her apartment building by Israeli Defense Forces. The title refers to the IDF practice of dropping a small device on buildings to warn inhabitants before they drop their full payloads. So we watch as Mariam furiously, slightly madly trains for the eventual evacuation of herself, her 6-year-old son Nour, and her elderly, easily winded mother. “How far can you run in five minutes?” she wonders aloud. It gives us pause to think about it.
Under Oliver Butler’s direction, these practice runs have a breathless urgency, and Ibraheem is an unfailingly ingratiating narrator and multi-character performer. But the urgency of Mariam’s monomania can get a bit exhausting. Early on, in a lightly self-parodic line, she denies that she’s an overprotective mother and insists she’s “a cool mom” just trying to “act normal.” Of course, one grim point of the show is to ask: What is normal in a war zone? The bleak spectacle of a mom frantically forcing herself to doom-prep is cruelly absurd, as is a chilling image she conjures of young children play-acting a funeral procession.
If Middle Eastern representation is notably scarce on New York stages, Palestinian stories are glaringly absent. So the mere existence of “A Knock on the Roof” is, like “English,” some cause for celebration. This one is a trauma narrative, no question, and one that ought to hit particularly hard right now, for obvious reasons; despite a fragile ceasefire, the devastation of Gaza is a moral crime in which we are shamefully complicit. Ibraheem’s show, narrowly focused on a few days of terror in a previous war, feels more personal than political, arguably to its credit, though I would say to a fault.
It is probably too much to expect one show to speak to the full scope of this terrible moment, so I will instead wish for more, and more varied, stories of the Middle East (and now that I mention it, plays set among Middle Eastern folks in the United States) on our stages. It is, after all, our duty to welcome the stranger, for we were strangers once.
