As an equal opportunity employer, we welcome and encourage submissions from individuals of all gender identities, cultures, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and abilities. However, there are times when the breakdown of a casting call indicates the need for a culturally-specific role, or someone with specified lived experience in order to uphold the integrity of the artistic work. If you choose, you may provide us with the pronouns you would like us to use in your submission, or any other self-identification you wish to provide. If you are a person with a disability and require assistance during the application and/or hiring process, please let us know and we will work with you to meet your needs.

Given the cultural specificity of this play, we are especially interested in Persian actors for this role. We encourage Persian actors to self-identify as part of the submission process.

Set in a TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) class in the Iranian city of Karaj, near Tehran, in 2008, four students, each with their own motivations, set out to learn English. Omid has a green-card interview coming up. Roya is desperately learning English to be able to communicate with her granddaughter, who lives in Canada. Elham has been accepted to medical school in Australia. Goli is only eighteen, but she’s been captivated by the language since she was small; English may be the key to her future, but it’s also a deep aesthetic pleasure. The students’ native tongue is Farsi, but, with one big exception, we hear only English onstage. Guided by their teacher, Marjan, who has her own complex relationship to both English and Farsi, they participate in vocabulary exercises and conduct the sort of stilted small-talk dialogue characteristic of language classes as we unravel what’s at stake for them in their independent journeys of learning English. ENGLISH is written by Iranian-American playwright Sanaz Toossi and premiered in New York in 2022, winning the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play.