'We Should Be Here': Sanaz Toossi on Bringing English, With Its Middle Eastern Cast, to Broadway

It’s not often that your first play out of the gate wins a Pulitzer Prize and makes it to Broadway. But that’s just the case for playwright Sanaz Toossi. Her debut play, English, premiered Off-Broadway in 2022—immediately winning a basket of awards and cementing the young writer as an important new voice to watch. Though to hear Toossi talk about it, it's also been somewhat torturous.

“To sit in the middle of an audience is self masochistic,” Toossi says. “And any time they shift their legs, even dip into their purse for gum or to check their phone, it hurts me. I've never enjoyed watching my play.” Perhaps it’s because the play—now running at the Todd Haimes Theatre via Roundabout Theatre Company until March 2 (opening night is January 23)—is intensely personal for Toossi.

English takes place in a classroom in Iran where students are learning English so they’re able to work or study abroad. The play initially begins as a comedy, filled with cross-culture humor. Or as Toossi puts it: “I've always loved that, yeah, we're a play set in the Middle East, but the word ‘boner’ is in our play.” Yet underneath the laughs, there is a heartrending core: what you give up when you have to leave your home and assimilate elsewhere. What the loss of a mother tongue actually means—a loss of culture, history, personal connection. At the same time, what can be gained by learning another language, how your perspective of the world opens up and how different languages can allow you to become different people.

For Toossi, she feels all this deeply, as the daughter of Iranian immigrants. She was raised in Orange County, California, home of the second largest concentration of Iranians in America (the first being in Los Angeles).

“I wrote [English] in response to the [Muslim] travel ban that was enacted in 2017,” explains Toossi, in an interview with Playbill while the play was still in rehearsal. “I've had a front-row seat to the way immigrants and, more broadly, how people with accents are treated and perceived as less than you. And so, I wrote this as a scream into the void, never expecting that it would be done.”

English was written as Toossi’s MFA thesis at New York University (she graduated in 2018). After a delay because of COVID, when Toossi really thought it was never going to happen, the play got its world premiere in 2022 Off-Broadway at Atlantic Theater Company, in a co-production with Roundabout. The show was subsequently produced around the country, and in London. It also led to productions of Toossi’s other play set in Iran, Wish You Were Here, and helped her get gigs in film and television (including in the League of the Own reboot on Amazon Prime Video).

Though Toossi had a political motivation for writing English, the play functions more as a character study rather than containing any overt statement (aside from one character commenting how her accent is considered a “war crime"). In English, the students struggle with learning the language, speaking in very rudimentary statements and heavily accented English in the classroom. But in the scenes where they are speaking in Farsi, it is smooth and flowing—a showcase of how, for immigrants, there is a whole other world out there for them that monolingual folks are not privy to (and are usually not interested in learning about).

The play is quiet in its revelations; there's no dramatic reveal or shouting matches. Toossi admitted she had trouble picturing it on a big Broadway stage; at 740 seats, the Todd Haimes is a far cry from Atlantic Theater’s 199-seat stage. There are no celebrities—everyone involved is an unknown to Broadway. In fact, Toossi didn’t even advocate for this transfer—it was mostly director Knud Adams and Roundabout Interim Artistic Director Scott Ellis in conversation.

“What we created was so beautiful at the Atlantic. And part of what I think was beautiful about it is that our play is often quiet and it takes its own time, and it defines conflict in its own way, and it asks an audience to listen. I don't know that I equate all those things with a Broadway play," she says, with hesitancy, as if she was still processing what's happening. She then adds, with more confidence: “I guess now, I don't really care. We should be here. It might be kind of strange that we are, but we should be here.”

Tala Ashe, Pooya Mohseni, Marjan Neshat, Hadi Tabbal and Ava Lalezarzadeh Ahron R. Foster

And by “we,” Toossi is speaking about the entire team from the Off-Broadway run, including Adams and the original cast, who are all Middle Eastern actors and all making their Broadway debuts. While Toossi admits that she is anxious about her own Broadway debut (“I'm painfully aware that I'm inside one of the best things that's ever going to happen to me”), she has no such nerves about her cast. On days when she’s struggling not to freak out, they are what ground her.

“Before any award, before any reviews, this cast changed my life,” says Toossi. “They made me a better artist, a more rigorous artist, grittier. I loved fighting for choices with them. I love when they were a pain in the ass, and I love being a pain in the ass to them. I really just love working with them.”

So how is she dealing with her Broadway jitters? By focusing on making art with her friends, and not on how the audience will receive it. Because the first time around, that hyper-focus on what people thought of the play, and noticing when they shifted in their seats, made the entire experience so stressful for Toossi, she didn’t sleep. So now, on Broadway, she’s made her goals simpler: Try to have fun and tell a good story.

“The task is to create something beautiful that expresses who we are,” says Toossi, with no hint of doubt in her voice. “This time around, I just want us to let the play be ours. The first time we did it, we were terrified. We had no idea if it worked, and it was a revolving door of panic attacks.” Who was panicking? Toossi chuckles in response, exclaiming, “I’m calling out everybody! I had one, too.”

As for the larger task of representation, of what does it mean to have a play on Broadway with an all-Iranian cast—Toossi is trying to relieve herself of that burden. In the back of her mind, she’s aware that with the incoming Trump administration, “we could very well open our play on Broadway in the wake of another travel ban." At the same time, "I’m having an existential crisis: What does it mean to get to make the ask of, will you just see us as human? That feels like I'm setting myself up to fail. And it's why this time, I just want us to tell the story to each other, not to the audience.”

Though to that prospective audience, Toossi says this, with a smile: “It’s a good time, just come! It's probably not what you think it is, and that doesn't mean you have to like it—but let it surprise you.” It's safe to say, with this debut, Broadway audiences will be in for a delightful surprise.

See photos from the Off-Broadway run of English below.