But in previews, Toossi, 33, still found herself negotiating, and sometimes resisting, the reaction of her audience. In one scene, Elham, a young, fiercely intelligent aspiring medical student, struggles with an oral presentation and splutters to her classmates, in halting English, “I want everyone to know I am not idiot.” The instructor corrects her, and Elham’s next line, “I am not an idiot,” gets a reliably huge laugh. “Then she starts crying, and everyone’s stomach drops,” says Toossi, who began to weep herself when she first heard the Broadway audience roar at the line. “The intention is to implicate the audience in that laughter because the desire to get an audience to interrogate its privilege sounds to me like what a political play is or can be,” she says. On paper, “English” can read as a deeply observed group character study. But when it’s performed in front of a mostly white, mostly affluent crowd, it becomes something else as well. “Because of who we’re talking to — and that’s who I wanted to talk to,” she says, “yes, I think it’s a political play, and I’ve made my peace with that.”
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