English at BCT

Or: Mother Tongue

One of my absolute favorite devices in theater is presenting an audience with two languages. When we know perfectly well that one mode of speech comes in the phrases, idioms, history and elegance or one tongue, and then to understand the same in another. The joy of perfect understanding, of being able to straddle the gap between languages is thrilling. So much so that sometime’s I forget that the gap is the point.

In Sanaz Toossi’s English a class of four Iranians gather under the tutelage of Marjan (Pantea Ommi), to learn that devilish creole called English that has buccaneered its way across the globe. Each comes for a different reason: Roya (Shila Ommi) a proud grandmother, wants to connect with her far flung family, Omid (Fady Demian) the laid back star student, wants a green card to the United States, Elham (Ariana Mahallati) a prickly doctor, wants to excel in her profession in Australia, and Goli (Maliha Sayed), starry eyed and swoon-some, shares Marjan’s love of this exotic tongue. The rules are that only English may be spoken, so the audience switches back between accented English, and accentless Farsi.

As the students (and their teacher) progress through the course, each struggle with who they are in their own language, and who they become in another. There is an sharpness to the cuts between Toossi’s scenes that director (and dialect coach) Vaneh Assadourian salves with the moving of desks and rustling of bags. Though the playwright’s suddenness may be intentional. it undercuts the scenes where we find some flash of pride or humiliation to button the scene.

Humiliation, a weed that sprouts in any classroom setting, is abundant in this play. Many of the most poignant moments come from the diminishment enforced by another language. Wit, wisdom, an ability to express who you are, all that is squashed under the struggle to be understood. How can anyone be a person laboring under such a weight?

Though this question is born out in many ways, with many different answers, my favorite moments were the clashes between Elham and Marjan. Ommi (the younger) rushes headlong, both in her enthusiasm for her subject and her disapprobation when her rules are bucked. She sweeps about, all smiles, but showing more and more of desperation as the two languages, the two worlds, begin to slide further and further apart. In contrast Mahallati is all knots and proud perching; Elham the immovable object to Marjan’s seemingly unstoppable force. Her pride and upright carriage makes it all the more humorous when she zags into pettiness, getting the best laughs of the play. Mahallati also has the most to juggle, dialect-wise being most erudite in Farsi and the least accomplished in English; praise to her for juggling these so easily.

It’s fitting then between the two characters who love and hate English the most should have the last word of the play, as Toossi slowly closes the door on her characters, ushering the audience away.

Language is an absolutely wild concept. Through constrictions of air and the position of lips and teeth, through gesture and sign, through the shapes of characters in chalk or clay or ink, by common agreement we as a species can set down, or at least attempt to, the vastness of our experience and the world. So to, in the art of translation, we find a little bit of magic as we transmute our own experiences to another language, and so find the poetry of what we took for granted in our own mouths.