The other choice is chaos — let the students run the classroom and no one learns. “English” explores the tyranny, but fudges the chaos. Left unexplained is how one incompetent student eventually aces her TOEFL. Also weakly explained is why another student, proficient in English, takes this class.

Sanaz Toossi’s buoyant, Pulitzer-winning drama follows a group of Iranians learning English, highlighting the desires and circumscribed circumstances that have brought them to the class.

For the students in Sanaz Toossi’s dramedy about mother tongues and other tongues, the world’s lingua franca is not exactly free.