“My nervous system is definitely in recovery mode,” says Tala Ashe, in the days immediately following the end of her Broadway show “English.” “I think with a sprinkle of some denial that it’s over, and some grief around that.”
After a hit run off-Broadway, the Pulitzer Prize-winning play made its transfer to Broadway with a limited run that ended earlier this month. Ashe, who starred in the five-person show as Elham, is still getting used to the fact that her evenings are now free.
Leading up to the show’s final nights, Ashe says she and her fellow cast members each took turns being the emotional one for the night.
“The thing that was most important, I would say to all of us, was that we just continued to honor the integrity of the show and that our feelings were our feelings, and that actually had very little to do with the show, and that we had to just tell the story that we had worked so hard with so much nuance to create and to build together,” Ashe says.
“English” is set in an Iranian classroom and tells the story of four adults trying to learn English for their proficiency exam. Sanaz Toossi first wrote the book in 2017 as a response to then President Donald Trump’s Muslim travel ban, and the show opened on Broadway in the beginning of Trump’s second presidency. In the years between, the Woman, Life, Freedom Movement also took place in Iran in 2022.
Ashe has been part of the show since its original off-Broadway run three years ago — “and it’s sort of been an interesting and difficult three years in some ways,” she says.
Tala Ashe
Courtesy of Josiah Bania
“Before when we did the show off-Broadway, the Woman, Life, Freedom Movement had not happened in Iran. And in the subsequent three years that has happened, and we’ve all been very invested and involved. And personally speaking, I’ve tried to be as much as an advocate and activist around what specifically the women in Iran are doing. So that entered into the subconscious unconscious of doing the show and of representing Iranian women on a Broadway stage,” Ashe says. “It just felt all that more heavy and impactful and important. So yeah, it was a span of time to spend with this play, but also world events entered into it in an interesting and impactful way.”
“English” could be interpreted therefore as an extremely political play, but it can also be experienced as a stand-alone piece of art about relationships and communication and what it means to leave a country and learn a new language.
“I can’t tell you how many people came up to us and said, ‘This is a perfect play.’ And I agree — I mean, obviously I’m biased,” Ashe says. “But there’s also that added layer of people saying, ‘I’m changed by seeing this play. I’m a little more empathetic. I’m changed for the better.’ We heard that so many times. And in this world where all of us — well, I’m certainly vacillating between grief and disbelief and avoidance and rage, to be part of or to be a witness to a piece of art that gives you a little bit more empathy and a little bit more understanding to the people around you.…I just think I can’t overstate how much of a miracle that is.”
