The premise of this play is that in Tehran, or somewhere near it, in the late 90s I think, a woman at a school is teaching English to a group of students whose skills vary from struggling to almost perfect. The cleverest thing about it is that when they are speaking Farsi, they speak quickly and with American accents, but when they are speaking English they have thick accents and often struggle to find the right words.
The class is supposed to be conducted in English only, but they students often slip back into Farsi to make communication easier. Their teacher gives them tick marks each time they use Farsi and they are allowed 5 before they are sent home as punishment.
This reminded me of a terrible French teacher I had who deducted half or a quarter grade off your final grade point every time she heard you speak English. So in the end of my senior year, I walked away with a D in a class that I had loved. But it didn’t matter at that point. I was already accepted at University and would never need my high school transcript again. I just remember the hurt and viciousness of it.
What these students are actually trying to achieve is a good or greater than good score on the TOEFL which stands for Test of English as a Foreign Language. It’s the equivalent of the SAT and it tests non-native speakers for their ability to speak English if they want to enter a university or college. The fact that it’s set in Iran is of no consequence. But I got the sense that the author is probably one of those people who is in love with language (Farsi, based on what is said in the play), and attributes to language much more than is actually there. I know someone who is the same way about Yiddish. Most French people love their language. The Scottish have done amazing things with English. And in America, according to John McWhorter, we more or less hate our language, even though racists all over the country use English to discriminate against people like those in this play, who are struggling to sound more and more American. I don’t know if the nature of language is such that a society or a person can be changed by it, or that their personality is molded by it. Because while watching one of the characters wax rhapsodic about the beauty of Farsi and the balance of it, I kept thinking about all those war mongering men who also speak Farsi. Does Scottish slang make the Scots happier and funnier? This idea was explored very satisfyingly in Denis Villeneuve’s (Ted Chiang’s) Arrival, where Amy Adams mind was actually changed once she started writing and speaking in Heptapod or whatever it was called, which was more of a visual language like cuniform.
The play is an hour and 40 minutes with no intermission, and it moves somewhat slowly due to a classroom “cube” that rotates to a different side depending on the scene. But sometimes this movement takes longer than it should and there is a lot of classical music to go with it. In the end, it was satisfying.