“What is a common saying in your language? What does it mean to you?” These questions are posed on a lobby display while the crowd gathers at the Alliance Theatre for Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play English, on stage through September 17. The play tells the story of four Iranians who are enrolled in an English language course as they grapple with how different forms of self-expression impact identity. What parts of themselves do they have to give up in order to speak a language that the rest of the world has deemed mandatory?

Toossi’s script handles these questions deftly, using a shabby classroom as a container for this exploration of linguistic identity. Each character has a distinctly different relationship to the English language, the most contentious of which is Elham’s (Sade Namei). A graduate student hoping to study gastroenterology in Australia, Elham is taking the class out of necessity, despite her stubborn preference for Farsi. Her resistance to English puts her at odds with Marjan (Pooya Mohseni), the class’ instructor who is enamored with the language.

The conflict between Elham and Marjan forms the dramatic and emotional crux of the play. Elham insists that she cannot express herself in English the way she can in Farsi. The words are just words to her, without deeper meaning. When she stumbles over English words, she worries that she sounds like an idiot. Marjan loves the way English feels in her mouth but privately struggles with feeling like neither language captures the fullness of who she is.

Elham and Marjan sit at opposite ends of the spectrum, with the other characters filling in the space in between with their own varying relationships to language and culture. These contrasting ideas about what it means to assimilate into a new language raises the question: Where does the line between education and assimilation lie?

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