When actor Marjan Neshat was a child living in Iran in the ’80s, the police tried to kidnap her older sister. Neshat and her sister were walking down the street in Tehran, when a van pulled up next to them; the men inside were armed. They admonished Neshat’s sister for showing her hair and told her to get in their van.
“It was the morality police. I realized what was happening, and just fell to the ground and started screaming,” recalls Neshat. Her outcry led to Neshat’s sister being let go with a warning. But that, coupled with two people being whipped to death at school, made Neshat’s parents realize they had to leave. The 1979 Iranian Revolution, which had sought to overthrow the country's authoritarian government, had instead ushered in an even stricter, more religious order. And their family, who were atheists, were not safe.
“My mom was basically like, ‘There is no way of guaranteeing that I can protect my daughters,’” recalls Neshat. The family had an uncle living in Seattle, who was able to get them visas. They left in 1984, when Neshat was eight; she hasn’t been back since.
But currently, every night on Broadway, she travels spiritually to Iran via the play English by Sanaz Toossi. The Pulitzer Prize-winning play, which has been selling out at the Todd Haimes Theater, takes place in a classroom in Iran, where adult students are learning English—with varying degrees of success—in order to work and study abroad. Neshat plays the encouraging, yet no nonsense, English instructor Marjan. The show is in performances until March 2. For the longtime actor, who was once told there was no place for her in the industry and who never thought she would get to Broadway, being part of English and having over 700 people listen to her speak every night is a vindication.
"There is something that is profound about it," she muses. "There's so many quiet scenes, and sometimes you can hear a pin drop. To share your spirit with that many people every night feels really both magical and unexpected."
English takes Neshat back to when her family immigrated to America—when they also struggled with the English language. “Something that's really special about this play is we've had a kind of front-row seat to what our parents went through in terms of accents and in terms of how they were not accepted or belittled or had to fight their way through it,” explains Neshat. “I had a little bit of that when I came here in fourth grade, and people would speak loudly to me. When I first didn't know English, I was made to feel like it's because I'm hard of hearing or dumb.”
Neshat first starred in the play in its 2022 world premiere at Off-Broadway’s Atlantic Theater Company. At the time, she had been a working actor for two decades but had rarely done work that felt artistically fulfilling. “The things that I was passionate about were, like, Chekhov and Ingmar Bergman…not a history lesson about the Middle East or a token crying Muslim,” she explains. “For so long, people were like, 'Well, you know, we don't quite know what to do with you.'”
But then, Neshat got the script for English, and immediately felt a connection—not just because the character in the play shared her name. The play does not follow typical Middle Eastern storytelling tropes of being a history lesson or a showcase of suffering; instead, it’s a character study of what it is to have to learn another language and to give up your own culture to assimilate to another.
In particular, the character of Marjan in English is someone who immigrated to Manchester and lived there for a time, before going back to Iran. And while she loves her home country, she also developed a love for British rom-coms and the English language—a love that makes her feel out of place among Iranians. Yet she also felt out of place in Manchester, where the locals called her Mary instead of her real name. That feeling, of never being able to be 100 percent of yourself in any place, is something Neshat related to, growing up in a white suburban neighborhood in Seattle. “It wasn't until I came to New York that I didn't feel on the outside of, just, this country,” she explains. “But then, I'm also on the outside in Iran, because I left so long ago, and I don't have that language. So I always sort of felt in between worlds. My way to connect was the arts, and my way to connect was through human behavior.”
As a lover of Chekhov (she starred in a 2008 Off-Broadway production of The Seagull with Dianne Wiest and Alan Cumming), English satisfies Neshat’s artistic brain in another way: It enables her to imbue every line with intense meaning, especially the more opaque ones. For instance, when Marjan is asked why she left Manchester, she responds simply with: “I got tired.” Neshat's delivery infuses that line with a hint of sadness, while still trying to remain upbeat. But what does it mean?
Neshat created her own backstory for Marjan: “When I say, ‘I got tired,’ I think it just wasn't tenable to do that for the rest of my life…If she had fallen in love there, or if she had been able to be met in a fuller way, maybe she could have continued. But I think that that didn't happen. And I think on some level, it was easier to come back [to Iran] and retain the romance of that than to accept every day being shut out and [treated] less than and to continue to fight for the little crumbs you're given.”
Ask Neshat any question about what a line in English means, and she’ll give a detailed explanation—a testament to her deep work in building character, and her love for the play.
Another scene in English that has been heavily discussed is the ending. Throughout English, the students speak in heavily accented English, struggling to communicate with each other. The audience laughs and sighs empathetically along with them. But then Toossi has Neshat and actor Tala Ashe conduct a scene entirely in Farsi—so the characters can express themselves entirely as they are, unencumbered. And in a pointed choice, the scene is not subtitled.
When asked what she is saying in those final moments, Neshat doesn’t give a word-for-word translation. Instead, she explicates the meaning of what her character is trying to say to Ashe’s Elham, who had been struggling with her accent the entire play: “What I'm saying to her, and I think it is quite sad, is, ‘One day, your voice may change, too, and you may sound foreign to yourself.’ And I think, really, what I'm saying is, ‘You just never know how life's gonna hit you. You don't know how you'll change. And it's so beautiful.’ Elham says, ‘At least I'm myself, and it is a beautiful thing to know yourself that well.’ It's bittersweet.”
Ever a fan of subtext, Neshat also points out that there is a deeper meaning to the scene—the characters had felt on the outside the entire play, struggling to find the right words and not being able to completely understand English: “Their attempt has been to struggle with that alienation for so long. And [Sanaz] just, for a second, turns the gaze, and is like, this is what it feels like to be locked out.”
Neshat then adds, affectionately, of her "artistic soulmate": “I love her so much, in a way that I feel this is why I love Chekhov—the script and the characters are bottomless. It never felt the same, any night. And I have never not felt something differently or not learned something in doing it.”
After her breakthrough performance in English in 2022, Neshat won an Obie Award, did another Toossi play (Wish You Were Here), did another play set in the Middle East (Selling Kabul), did a one-woman play (Sandra), and got a recurring role in The Night Agent on Netflix (the second season was released last month). And now, English has taken her to Broadway—an event that's caused Neshat to marvel at how far she, and her family, have come.
“[My mom] came to opening night, and we had a moment where I was like, ‘Mom, can you believe it? Can you believe this road?’ And she's like, ‘Think of how I'm feeling: My mom was married off at 13. She didn't know how to read or write,’” Neshat recalls, her voice thick with emotion. “It's a huge space to have traveled in, like, a generation or two generations.” She then adds, “It’s both so moving, and it's almost too much to hold in your brain.” That’s life and also, that’s English.
