THEATRE REVIEW

JANUARY 2026 | Volume 259

 

We’re in a classroom near Tehran, sometime in the more-or-less present. There are movable chairs and a whiteboard on which is written “TOEFL test,” the English-as-a-foreign-language proficiency exam. The test is six weeks away. Four Iranian adults are taking the course. The teacher writes, “English only” on the board.

This is English, the 2023 Pulitzer Prize-winner from Iranian-American playwright Sanaz Toossi, being staged by Blackout Art Society, an organization founded by Vancouver’s Persian community. All the production’s actors and the director, Amir N. Hosseini, are Iranian-Canadian.

The play itself is a low-key exploration of the power of language and its relationship to place and notions of identity and belonging. Conspicuous by its absence is any overt reference to politics, repression, rebellion, fear of authority, government or any of the other elements of civil life in Iran that we so often see on the news. The students are taking this test in order to get a visa, a green card, or admission to med school in Australia, so the Iranian political situation may be an implicit subtext to the discussions and actions in the play, but it is almost entirely invisible.

When speaking English in the production, the characters speak with accents. When they speak Farsi (in English), their English is unaccented. Eighteen-year-old Goli (Baran Mehrdadian) is the most relaxed of the students and the class clown. Elham (Nikta Ghazi), the prospective med school student, is the most competitive and uptight. She seems to have the most need to pass the test. Marjan (Ava Nasiri), the oldest, wants to visit her son and grandchild in Canada. The only man in the play, Omid (Navid Charkhi), has the easiest time with English, explaining that he has a couple of American cousins. But none of them really has an easy time, not even the teacher, Roya (Mahbubeh Mojtahed), who spent nine years living in Manchester.

The plot takes a couple of twists but nothing much happens. The guts of the play and its potential power lie in the existential questions raised by the characters’ reactions to trying to live in another language. Most of the reviews I’ve seen have described it as a comedy that turns serious. This production does have some funny moments, mostly thanks to Goli, and it does turn serious as the characters reveal how high their stakes really are, which have less to do with visas and green cards than with the psychological and emotional costs of leaving your native language and living in one fundamentally alien to you, in which you will forever be a foreigner. Or at best, as Omid describes himself, living in the gap between English and Farsi. Or as Marjan asks about trying to speak only English, “How long can you live in isolation from yourself?”

The play is difficult to pull off because it continually moves back and forth in subtle transitions between comedy and drama, frustration and exhilaration, desire and doubt. The Blackout Arts production comes alive in moments. But too often the beats lack the tension they need or peter out when they should quietly climax to reveal clearly what the Guardian reviewer called the characters’ “complicated grief.”All the actors have their moments, too. But the 90-minute show needs a clearer shape, not just the series of check-marks that the actors literally make on the whiteboard’seighteen-class schedule at the completion of each scene.

 

 

 

 

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