There’s an understated charm to Sanaz Toossi’s one-act drama English, which opened Thursday at Roundabout’s Todd Haimes Theatre on Broadway three years after its premiere at the Atlantic Theatre Company. The setting is a provincial Iranian city in 2008, where a small but disparate group of adults gather in a storefront classroom for a six-week crash course to pass the Test of English as a Foreign Language. The motivations of the students are as varied as their backgrounds: the stately Roya (Pooya Mohseni) needs to be proficient enough to speak English with her granddaughter, whom her son is raising in Canada with hopes of shedding much of his Iranian past; feisty, sarcastic Elham (Tala Ashe), a five-time failure at the TOEFL, needs to prove her proficiency to attend medical school in Australia where she’s won provisional admittance; young Goli (Anma Lalezarzadeh), a fan of Ricky Martin and English-language pop, has enrolled mostly on a lark; and the class’s lone man, Omid (Hadi Tabbal), seems evasive about his reasons for taking the course — especially since it soon becomes clear that his English, particularly his accent, is demonstrably stronger than the teacher’s.

As the instructor, a scarf-wearing woman named Marjan, Marjan Neshat cuts a fascinating figure in the class and on the stage. She’s a stern taskmaster, insisting that her students not slip into Farsi during class, but also a sympathetic presence who invites the students to watch Hollywood rom-coms like Notting Hill and Moonstruck with her during office hours. We learn that she lived for nine years in Manchester, England, long enough to really absorb both the language and culture of another place, before returning to Iran some years ago for reasons she never reveals, to a husband she never discusses. But there’s an aloofness about her, to the way she wears her bright red head scarf with a casual sophistication, that sets her apart from the class — and Omid’s presence and nearly-fluent command of English forces her to question just how much of her adopted language is slipping away from her mastery, and where that leaves her. “These two languages, they [war] in my head. And the Farsi is winning,” she admits at one point. “I feel like I’m disappearing.”

Interestingly, Marjan seems to advocate for learning English beyond the practical reasons that drew most of her students to the class — and that’s a source of tension that escalates as the play unfolds. Can we truly learn another language without leaving behind something of our selves, and our native tongue and culture? That conflict is artfully rendered in the dialogue — which is performed in halting, heavily accented, error-filled fashion when the characters are stumbling through English and then in looser, more rapid-fire, and often profanity-laced style when they default to their native Farsi. It’s also dramatized in scenes in which Marjan’s students resist the assimilationist impulses that come with learning the language of the world’s biggest superpowers — like Marjan’s admission that she went by the name “Mary” when living overseas. (“Don’t you think people ought to do us the courtesy of learning our names?” Roya notes.)

Toossi, who won the Pulitzer Prize for English, is not exactly charting new ground here. The Iranians’ battle over their mother tongue owes a debt to Brian Friel’s Translations, while the understated group dynamics recall recent plays like Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Translation that allow the gradual revealing of backstory within the structure of a regular gathering of virtual strangers. But she brings a good deal of skill, and of big-heartedness, to her portrayals — even as she ultimately withholds more than she discloses. That, too, is fitting for the dynamics of a six-week extracurricular class that people slot into their otherwise full daily lives. Elham gradually learns to pronounce W words correctly and wins an in-class vocabulary game over star pupil Omid. Roya recognizes the marked difference between “visit” and “live” in the communications she receives from her ex-pat son, a lesson that leaves a devastating impact on her. Meanwhile, Omid and Marjan grow so close that they seem on the verge of a connection with the shades of romance — a possibility that is abruptly and all too plausibly dashed.

What’s missing, though, is a sense of what Iran was like in a moment that drew these characters into this classroom — why Elham would seek out a foreign medical school, why Goli would listen to Ricky Martin songs, why Marjan returned to Iran after a decade in the U.K. (and what led her overseas in the first place). The drama also elides the world outside the classroom: If any of these characters seem concerned about the shifting status of women in an increasingly oppressive country, or the geopolitical turmoil in their region of the world, they remain silent on such matters.

Toossi’s concerns are smaller, more personal, though no less meaningful. She introduces us to a group of people at an affectionate distance, revealing only so much about each as we would likely absorb if we were seated in the classroom ourselves. Director Knud Adams orchestrates the action at a steady, unrushed pace, the scenes shifting much like Marsha Ginsberg’s spare, spinning cube of a set (which includes a vertical corner support beam that annoyingly blocks off performers at some points, depending on where you’re seated). The cast, all reprising their roles from three years ago, feels even more entrenched — there’s no need for broad gestures or hyped-up line readings when the characters feel this organic and lived-in.

English is an absorbing snapshot of people in transition, seeking reinvention and self-improvement while worrying if they will shed too much of what makes them themselves.

ENGLISH
Todd Haimes Theatre, Broadway
Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through March 2