Review: Is Guthrie’s Pulitzer Prize winner ‘English’ too subtle for its own good?

The English language has embodied the ideals of America long before there was an America.

Turn to any page in the dictionary and you will find, cheek-by-jowl, words that come from languages everywhere. That’s different from say, Japanese, which has three alphabets that segregate words by their origins. The linguistic openness of English has helped it to become the lingua franca of people across the globe.

Nearly 1.5 billion people are fluent in it and for three-quarters of those, it’s a second language. A handful of those speakers are hoping to get better at it by taking a language class in an Iranian storefront in “English,” Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2022 play that opened Friday at Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theater.

The work is subtle and clever, even as it vexes a lover of language by the way it leaves some of history’s haunted ghosts unexplored.

The “English” class is led by Marjan (Roxanna Hope Radja), an understanding but stern taskmaster who formerly lived in Manchester, England, and now teaches English partly to keep her world expansive. But that’s not how Elham (Nikki Massoud), who wants to study medicine in Australia, sees it. She is suspicious of the way Marjan elevates a foreign language above her native tongue, Farsi.

Elham is smart and fiery and wants to learn the language even as she fights against it because, well, she knows that Farsi is the language of poetry and lyrical dreaming.

The class also includes 50-something Roya (Sahar Bibiyan), who wants to be able to communicate with her grandchildren in Canada; sweet-spirited teenage student Goli (Shadee Vossoughi); and mystery man Omid (Pej Vahdat), who has an uncanny facility with the language. All are prepping to take the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL).

Director Hamid Dehghani, who staged this co-production earlier this summer at Chicago’s Goodman Theater, leans into the nuances of Toossi’s script and the interpersonal questions that animate the characters’ awkward conversations. The play has a clear device. When the characters speak in Farsi, it’s delivered to the audience in unaccented English. But when they are learning their new language, the words are slow and belabored.

As these Iranians practice pronunciation and struggle with the quirks of a language that has many bizarre contradictions — including by watching “bootleg” movies — we get a glimpse into how they see themselves. “English,” then, is a mirror shining a light back onto their Farsi culture and traditions.

This all-Iranian cast delivers beautifully at the Guthrie, getting lyrically under the words and emotions of language learning. They make us feel like we’re inside 2008 Iran, with the floor-length blinds of Courtney O’Neill’s plain set offering a portal into a world of ordinary beauty, suppressed tension and violated trust.

We all understand the yearning of a grandmother who wants to be able to talk to her children abroad growing up in a foreign idiom. We also understand desires and sexual tension.

With its humor around the quirks of language, “English” humanizes Iranians, a people often demonized in our political discourse. In doing so, it shies away from ancient and current geopolitical tension but that history is unescapable. The language was promulgated at the tip of the spear of the British navy and now America, the world’s military and cultural hyperpower, is its chief exponent.

The play lands in the echoes of extremist howls of the Great Satan, which some Iranians call America, and a member of the “Axis of Evil,” which Americans have painted Iran. That this tension remains unspoken throughout does not mean that it’s not present. The playwright and director have chosen a path that allows us to hear and see the affecting humanity of these characters, even if that approach ultimately mutes some of the power of the play.

For “English” is a language of reason, and as people left the Guthrie, there were calm discussions about the global contributions of Iran and America, great civilizations where languages are learned as pathways to stubborn hopes and dreams.

When: 7:30 p.m. most nights through Aug. 18. 1 p.m. shows on most Wed., Sat. & Sun.

Where: Guthrie Theater, 818 S. 2nd St., Mpls.

Tickets: $29-$82. guthrietheater.org