Tony Award nominee Marjan Neshat makes history in celebrated Broadway play 'English'

NEW YORK (AP) — Marjan Neshat is a veteran of stage and screen who teaches fledgling actors. Like so many of us, she sometimes has bouts of self-doubt.

“I think on the first day of class, I still always have imposter syndrome, but I’ve grown to live with it,” she says. “I never thought that I had the gravitas to be like, ‘I’m going to teach you acting.’”

This semester, her students at The New School got to witness self-doubt kicked to the curb when Neshat became a first-time Tony Award nominee. “I’m sure they’re all a bit more smitten with me now,” she says, laughing.

Neshat earned the nod for her work — appropriately enough — playing a teacher in Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer Prize-winning and Tony Award-nominated play “English,” which premiered on Broadway in the fall.

“There’s something about this play that feels so bottomless,” she adds. “It kind of felt like winning the lottery because it was, to me, everything as an actress that I care about — it was artistic, and it was subtle and it was nuanced.”

A different depiction of Middle Eastern life

“English” explores the ways in which language shapes identity, can help people feel understood or misunderstood and the push and pull of culture. It’s set in a storefront school near Tehran, where four Iranian students are preparing over several weeks for an English language exam.

Neshat plays their teacher, a woman who loves rom-coms and English but who is unmoored, a foot in Iran and one in England, where she lived for many years but never completely felt at home.

“We don’t always belong to what we’re born to,” says Neshat. “She understands the potential of language and the potential of reaching beyond yourself. And yet she’s at a point in her life where she’s also losing a lot of that.”

The play is packed with cultural references — like Christiane Amanpour, Hugh Grant and “Whenever, Wherever” by Shakira. One character admires Julia Roberts’ teeth, saying “They could rip through wire. In a good way.”

“I feel like so often, when you’re telling stories about a different culture, especially in the Middle East, it’s like, ‘Well, we wanna see them behind the veil’ and ‘We want to see our idea of them.’ And I feel like, especially with my character, I feel it defies all of that. I feel she is romantic and flawed and complicated.”

The play has made history by making Neshat and co-star Tala Ashe the first female actors of Iranian descent to be Tony-nominated. (The first Iranian-born actor to receive a Tony acting nomination was Arian Moayed.)

The two face off at the Tonys on June 8 in the category of best performance by an actress in a featured role in a play alongside Jessica Hecht, Fina Strazza and Kara Young.

One woman, two worlds

Neshat’s family fled postrevolutionary Iran in 1984, when Neshat was 8, and she hasn’t been back since. She decided early on she wanted to act, despite her mother’s fear that her daughter might share the same fate as Marilyn Monroe.

She adores the plays of Anton Chekhov and watching movies on the Criterion Channel, and she’s obsessed with the novel “Anne of Green Gables.” “I’m not like super-showy. I’m interior and deep,” she says. When “English” ended its run, she and the cast wept in their dressing rooms.

“She (Neshat) thrives in mystery and yearning and I think I’ve always strived to capture a feeling that goes beyond language. She’s after that, too,” says Toossi. “I think she holds contradictions and leaves space for the audience. She operates in a register must of us can’t quite reach.”

Neshat’s credits range from the movies “Sex in the City 2” and “Rockaway” to an off-Broadway production of “The Seagull” with Dianne Wiest and Alan Cumming, and to roles on TV in “New Amsterdam,” “Quantico,” “Elementary” and “Blue Bloods.”

“I’ve sort of been saved by art in so many ways,” she says. “It’s been sometimes like a really bad boyfriend, and it’s brought out all my middle school rejection and angst, but truly, in the best of ways, I have, I think, become more myself or understood who I am.”

‘A cry into the void’

“English” — written in the wake of President Donald Trump’s ban on travelers from several predominantly Muslim countries during his first term — premiered off-Broadway at Atlantic Theater Company in 2022 with Neshat in the teacher’s role.

“There is something very emotional about the fact that she wrote this as like a cry into the void when the Muslim ban happened and the fact we were like opening shortly after Trump became president,” says Neshat. “Just the culmination of all these things, it felt like an event.”

She has a tight bond with Toossi, nurturing her “English” and also appearing in the playwright’s “Wish You Were Here.” The playwright once saw Neshat at a play reading before they ever met and soon gave the teacher in “English” the name Marjan. Neshat jokes that “she wrote me into being.”

“Her writing has given me some of the richest roles of my life,” says. Neshat. For her part, Toossi says getting Neshat and Ashe to be Tony-nominated is her proudest achievement.

On the opening night for “English” on Broadway, Neshat was joined by her mother and her 12-year-old son, Wilder, and they marveled at the journey life takes you.

Neshat’s grandmother was married at 13 in Iran and never learned to read or write, though she dictated poems and letters. Just two generations later, their family has star on Broadway.

“The little girl I was in Iran would never have imagined that I would be sitting with my mom and nominated for a Tony,” she says. “It just truly is a ride.”