Interview: English's Marjan Neshat and Sanaz Toossi, Comrades in Art

Coming out of Covid in 2021, Marjan Neshat had one of those seasons that any actor dreams of. In rapid succession within a year, she starred in four deep and meaningful plays: Sylvia Khoury’s Selling Kabul at Playwrights Horizons, Sanaz Toossi’s English at the Atlantic, Toossi’s Wish You Were Here back at Playwrights, and David Cale’s Sandra at the Vineyard. The Tehran-native received an Obie for English — playing Marjan, an English teacher for Iranian students studying for the Test of English as a Foreign Language — as well as a special Drama Desk Award for both English and Kabul.

Neshat’s run of plays caught the attention of the New York theater scene, but the most important eye was that of Toossi’s. They hadn’t worked together before English, but Toossi admired Neshat from afar and dreamed of becoming her friend. Three years later — and now with the Pulitzer-winning English on Broadway via Roundabout at the Todd Haimes Theatre — not only are Neshat and Toossi besties, but Neshat describes Toossi as “her left arm.”

Over a casual Zoom conversation, the pair discussed their artistic collaborations, how English was not a natural for Broadway, and what they’re dreaming of for the future.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

I did not see English at the Atlantic, but after seeing it on Broadway, I completely understand why it’s as acclaimed as it is.
Sanaz Toossi: Oh, thank you. It scaled up, to everyone’s surprise.

Was that a concern in the rehearsal room between you and your director, Knud Adams?
Sanaz: Knud is the reason we’re on Broadway. He made it happen. We are on Broadway despite me. I was like, what made us so beautiful at the Atlantic was the quiet and the small, and how would that ever translate to Broadway? You can speak to the rehearsal room, Marjan.

Marjan Neshat: Knud made a few adjustments for Broadway but on the whole, he really maintained his ethos about the play, which is that you don’t ask for a laugh, this is the truth all the way through, and you’re speaking to each other. He gave us a lot of notes about diction and having to hit the ends of words and to not rely on the microphones.

Sanaz, what was it that changed your mind about the show working in a larger space?
Sanaz: So, Knud did the show at Studio Theatre in D.C. in 2023 and it was a different production with different actors, and it was beautiful. Then, he took that production to Barrington Stage, where I played Elham. I don’t think I’d ever seen a production of English in a house that big. That was part of the plan to show Scott Ellis [at Roundabout] that the play can expand, and it really worked.

Knud and Scott were talking and at every point, I was like, “I don’t care, I don’t want it, I’m not going to push for it, but I’m also not going to say no.” I didn’t know why anyone would want it, because we had such a beautiful, glorious run at the Atlantic and why would everyone want to corrupt everything?

Marjan: Knud definitely told me that you only agreed so you could give me my Broadway debut.

How long do you two go back?
Marjan: We really had not spent a lot of time together until we started the rehearsal process for English at the Atlantic in 2022, and then [with Wish You Were Here immediately following at Playwrights Horizons] I spent six months inside her brain, and it was the best six months of my life.

Sanaz: I will obviously not say the name, but I saw her in a reading of a play that was just so long and so bad and I immediately fell in love with her craft and knew I had to work with her. I just knew seeing her act that she wanted the same things I want. Even though she was bound by this, like, shitty play, I was still seeing her. I had a feeling that she would like me — I really, really needed her to like me.

Marjan: I’m blackout in love with her now, and I’m constantly like, “What are we gonna do when this ends?” I text her between shows. It’s kind of like she’s my left arm.

Have you ever thought about what you’d like to ask each other about your processes?
Marjan: I’m curious if you always knew you were going to put Iranians center.

Sanaz: That is a great question. I had come to that realization after college. Like, I was a disaster after college. I didn’t know what I was doing. I worked at a pizza shop. Things were not looking great for me. But I knew that I loved to write, and my life was such a disaster that I went to Iran the summer after I graduated. As I was looking around everything in my grandmother’s house that was so beautiful and carries so much meaning for me, I was reckoning with how Iranian I felt and how American I felt, and I had to ask myself why it never occurred to me to write us.

I wanted them to sound like me, and for some reason, I thought I was breaking a rule. Once I started writing Iranian women, and once I let them sound like a Valley Girl like me, then I fell in love and thought it was worth pursuing. So, it took me a while, but when I got to grad school, I knew what I wanted to do.

Something I love about you is your pursuit of truth and how deeply you need to understand your characters. This woman will not go on stage and lie. She won’t do it. And she will harass you for the truth. That’s one of the many things that makes you one of the best actors of your generation. It’s so hard for me to imagine what happens with you when you don’t get the truth of the character you’re playing. Just thinking about that reading I saw you in for that bad play, how do you play a role that you don’t love?

Marjan: It’s hard to be good in something that you don’t understand, or you don’t think is good. The thing that has been most important to me is to do work that I’m proud of. When I started out, the opportunities were so limited that I would take roles and infuse them with something. I really do feel what you’ve given me is an opportunity to do work that I’m proud of and put what I can do out there to a point that I don’t need to say yes to too many of those things anymore.

Sanaz: She pushes the work, so she pushes me. She has made me rigorous. When I bring in rewrites, if there’s something I’m not sure of, I’m like “Oh, she’s gonna sniff it out in a second and I won’t know the answers.” And I want to be clear, she doesn’t need me for the answers; she loves the yearning and the subtext and how a million little moments live in a line.

Marjan: I think that for my whole young artistic life, I wished to find my artistic partner. I never realized it would come in the shape of someone I not only like inside my being, but someone rigorous and beautiful and very feminine and strong. I feel very grateful every day that she found me, or I found her.