Sanaz Tossi started writing “English”, the Politzer award -winning drama, which is now shown at the Todd Hems Theater in the roundabout, as her thesis for postgraduate studies. She said that the play, which depicts the separation of the English language in Iran, was her angry reaction to “banning Muslims” – as Donald Trump’s executive was known for 2017 – which was released while she was seeking a master’s degree in Fine Arts at New York University. “The English language” was described as “she screamed in a vacuum.” The actual show, then, is a surprise: a nice and accurate experience that is meant by our ears of transformations in teaching and understanding methods.
The movie “English” was shown in Atlantic, in a joint production with The Roundabout, in 2022. It is primarily a comedy in the semester, directed by Knod Adams, as is the case now, with a focus on sarcastic sadness. The show tracks an advanced English language course, in the city of Karaj, Iran, in 2008, where four adult students are trying to master new vocabulary (““ Things you find in the kitchen. Go! ”) And completely non -Persian sound of the song. The letter “w” when the characters speak in English, they adopt a heavy tone; And when they are supposed to speak in Persian, they use English without accent, and quickly like thinking without hindrance. “But you are a war crime!” One of the frustrated students complains. It is a joke, but it alludes to the currents of culture and the empire.
Atlantic production remains mainly unchanged, and actors also came to Broadway. Teacher Marjan (Marjan Nashat) focuses on TOEFL (English language test as a foreign language), but the goals of its students differ: Inspiration (Tala Ash) often wants to join the Faculty of Medicine in Australia; Adolescent Jolly (Ava Lasarzadeh) is taking the test to keep her kidney options open; Perhaps a vision (Boya Mohsen) may move to Canada; The only student, Omid (Hadi Tabal), who is almost fluent in the language, says that he has an interview to get the American green card. The ease of penetration of Iran’s borders is self -evident, and everyone swings, stuck in a state of forgetfulness between departure and survival. Marjan exudes a certain sad ambiguity, which means magic – we know that she lived happily in the United Kingdom for nine years, however, for an indescribable reason, she has returned.
Omid, whose motives are rarely attracted to Marjan, remains during her office hours to watch romantic comedies in English, such as the old VHS bar for Notting Hill. The unexpected connection between the spouses beats alongside the high end of the film, written by Elvis Costilo. “she may be song That summer Sings“Costello is a blown. (Good luck for anyone who learns to build a sentence from that.) Also, lyric softening constitutes the most accurate comedy scene in the play. Jolie stumbles in poetry even when she claims that she loves English because of her non -poetic characteristics. I brought a pressed disk for Riki Martin for viewing and informing. “She strikes, she is beaten!” “Ricky” sings a small box, while shy excitement appears on the face of “Ghouli”. Then explain:
There is a beautiful classroom collection, which was designed by Marsha Ginsburg, inside a huge roundabout box, lighting up by Reda Bahgt to look like a floating in a black vacuum. Of course, the dark space around the group is not actually a vacuum. It is the common Jonah. Seeing a written play in response to the first Trump administration at the beginning of his second term seems a surreal matter. But Tosi keeps her political comments unclear by showing us an informal daily life in Iran, which we rarely see in the West. Women do not consider their loose veil when they come out, for example. Is this a challenge or indifference? Tosi allows us to ask. Its interest in a more universal question lies: the way in which uneducated languages can rub together, which sometimes leads to erasing sides – mercy, generosity, and humor – for the person who uses it.
Tossi himself speaks the Persian (born her parents in Iran) and English (born in California), and many characters contemplate the internal displacement of the dual language. Despite the accurate realism of the play frame and its dialogue, Tossi seems to write a metaphor for a wider experience, perhaps familiar to her, for the double awareness of the immigrant. Students may represent different aspects of the conflicting interior. As for a vision, English is crushed and colonized; As for Marjan, he is cloudy and abandoned. “I have always loved myself more in the English language,” says Morjan.
If you want to watch a play that is struggling more explicitly with the policy of life in Iran, the “blind hostility” play by Prince Reda Kahistani in the Persian language, which is produced by the Paris Mehr Group, is ending in the St. Ann warehouse, as part of the radar festival. While video display devices feed loved pictures on the dark walls, an imprisoned purchasing woman (Ainaz Azzarhoush) encourages her husband (Muhammad Reda Hussein Zadeh) to help a woman who was blind during a protest. “I don’t need to wear an uniform or cover my hair until I believe that I am in prison,” Azarhosh says to the camera. “Just imagine that,” the upper headlines guided us. I realized that the Koice’s warning did not leave me completely when I saw the word “English” several days later. Even the breeze of the show looked skillfully scary. Jolly talks about Facebook, and I hoped not to post.
After attending “English”, in an attempt to find out the reason for my frustration due to some fluctuations in the plot and the mystery of the characters, I prepared a reading “I wish you were here”, which is the second Tusi play that will be shown for the first time in 2022, which was written after a long period of “English” But it was produced only a month later in Playwrights Horizons. In that most accurate drama, a group of friends in Karaj speaks through them through decades: the revolution, the Iranian -Iraqi war, the reopening of universities, and religious violations. The tumultuous intimate relationship between friends – in many scenes, is fading, where women are either coloring the nails of another person or the legs of their legs – when most women leave the country. She played again the role of the main character, Nazanin, who looks a bit slight and completely lost. I remembered the ingenuity of Toussi in writing for people who do not understand their motives, and how to flourish Nashaat when her characters have a specific thing to hide. In the English language, there are also incomplete motives, but Tossi seems to be less control over it. In the wonderful “desire” play, the theatrical writer shows a lot of comfort with exclusion, and from paradoxes, with what is not announced.
I was thinking about languages and internal mechanisms to learn it while I was browsing a box of documents at another display under the radar, two days after watching “English”. Lebanese actress Tania El -Khoury and her husband, historian Ziad Abu Al -Rish, presented a joint presentation of the arts area in Brooklyble Dog, entitled “Energy Search”, on the power outage in Lebanon. (Even before the recent Israeli bombing operations, legalization could have led to the power out of some areas in the country for 23 hours a day.) After one such interruption, at their wedding ceremony, Al -Khoury and Abu Al -Rish pledged to reach the depths of electricity. The problem that appears to be the solution to the solution. For several years, they continued the puzzle, followed the answers to the archives in Brussels, Paris, Washington and Beirut.
If you attend the fastening version of the show, during the day, you are given a pair of headphones and you are directed to a long table, loaded with nuts and apricots for wedding parties, with a document box everywhere. Through headphones, we listened to the spouses’ account of their research. Under the guidance of them, we read Zerox messages in French on the stationery of the St. George Hotel, and we looked at photographs of American redevelopment plans from the fifties, and we brought slipping copies of films for Iranian newspapers. I felt I was asking again, as I sat there with my great wireless headphones and bend my head towards my work. Answers, and artists also follow the problems of the Lebanese Electricity Authority, besieged for more than a century, have always been related to the graft and transit exploitation of the national borders. I thought, thank God, that researchers are comfortable in many languages, otherwise these secrets remain hidden. ♦
