The English language has embodied the ideals of America long before there was an America. Turn to any page in the dictionary and you will find, cheek-by-jowl, words that come from languages everywhere. That's different from say, Japanese, which has three alphabets that segregate words by their origins.
The linguistic openness of English has helped it to become the lingua franca of people across the globe. Nearly 1.5 billion people are fluent in it and for three-quarters of those, it's a second language.
A handful of those speakers are hoping to get better at it by taking a language class in an Iranian storefront in "English," Sanaz Toossi's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2022 play that opened Friday at Minneapolis' Guthrie Theater. The work is subtle and clever, even as it vexes a lover of language by the way it leaves some of history's haunted ghosts unexplored. The "English" class is led by Marjan (Roxanna Hope Radja), an understanding but stern taskmaster who formerly lived in Manchester, England, and now teaches English partly to keep her world expansive.
But that's not how Elham (Nikki Massoud), who wants to study medicine in Australia, sees it. She is suspicious of the way Marjan elevates a foreign language above her native tongue, Farsi. Elham is smart and fiery and wants to learn the language even as she fights against it because, well, she knows that Farsi is the language of poetry and lyrical dreaming.
The class also includes 50-something Roya (Sahar Bibiyan), who wants to .