Review: As Trump rains down terror on Iran, Sanaz Toossi's Pulitzer-winning English has its L.A. premiere

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War has a way of curtailing imagination.When the news breaks of faraway civilian casualties — an erroneous air strike on a school that relied on outdated intelligence, for example — the mind takes refuge in abstractions and statistics.Grief isn’t an infinite resource.

There’s only so much distant suffering anyone can take in.Yet our moral health as a society depends on the recognition of our common humanity.

We share something with the inhabitants of those countries whose civilization our government has threatened to destroy.This is an important moment to experience “English,” Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, set in an English-language classroom outside of Tehran in 2008.The play, now having its L.A.

premiere at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, reminds us of the lives — the hopes, the dreams, the sorrows — on the other side of the headlines.(As I write this, the New York Times homepage has a story that stopped me dead in my tracks: ”Iranian Schools and Hospitals Are in Ruins, Times Analysis Shows.”)“English” isn’t trying to win any political arguments.

Its focus is on the characters, who are in a Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOFL) prep class.The exam will have an oversize effect on the future possibilities of this small, mishmash group of students.Elham (Tala Ashe) needs a high score to pursue her medical education in Australia.

Roya (Pooya Mohseni) wants to join her son in Canada to be part of her granddaughter’s life, but Persian is frowned upon in her son’s assimilated, English-language household.Omid (Babak Tafti), whose English is far beyond anyone else’s level in the class, has a U.S.

green card interview coming up.And Goli (Ava Lalezarzadeh), the youngest of the students, wants at the very least to be fluent in the lingua franca of American pop culture.

Marjan (Marjan Neshat), the teacher who...