The Brooklyn Rail

Ava Lalezarzadeh was a senior at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film, and Television when she got her hands on the script that would irrevocably change the course of her career. 

“Whoa, this is the best play I have ever read in my life,” she thought upon finishing Sanaz Toossi’s English, which follows four Iranian students and their language teacher as they prepare for an English language exam near Tehran.

Lalezarzadeh buzzed with excitement; she felt an immediate affinity with the eighteen-year-old character Goli—not so much because Lalezarzadeh is the child of Iranian immigrants, but more because of Goli’s outlook.

“She loves the confidence this new language gives her. It gives her distance from her former self, and permission to be who she wants to be,” said Lalezarzadeh. “I could just imagine that if I was learning a new language—this sort of seeing that opportunity as a cup half full seems aligned with who I am.” 

Lalezarzadeh shared that hopeful spirit as she made her Broadway debut in January, when the Pulitzer Prize–winning English began performances at the Roundabout Theatre Company.

Optimism has carried Lalezarzadeh through tough moments, like when the pandemic hit just as she was about to graduate and the theater and film industries locked down. It carried her post-graduation when she took a partly-remote job at an advertising agency, all the while keeping an eye out for English’s casting call and auditioning as much as possible on the side.

“I remember thinking: this will not be my life,” she said. “I’m not going to be here five years from now with a wasted-away dream.”

So when the time came to actually audition for English, Lalezarzadeh did everything she could to land the role.

“She went after it in a way that I had not encountered in someone before,” said actor Marjan Neshat, who co-stars as the language teacher in English. “She has a deep belief in herself and her dreams and puts a lot of work into it.”

Director Knud Adams said he cast a wide net in hopes of finding someone like Lalezarzadeh. “You know, someone who had boundless talent and was destined for a lot of great things, but hadn’t had the chance yet to be on the stage,” Adams said.

When she ultimately did first play Goli (which means “flower” or “rose-colored” in Persian) on stage in the 2022 off-Broadway run at the Atlantic Theater, Washington Post critic Peter Marks praised the way she brought out the character’s “gentle and poignant attributes.”

“She was born to do this,” said Caroline Daravi, Lalezarzadeh’s mother. “Acting charges her personhood.”

Growing up in southern California, Lalezarzadeh enjoyed performance and role play. As a young child, she aspired to become an actor, ballerina, or judge. Daravi, a psychologist, ascribes the latter to Lalezarzadeh’s strong moral compass.

But, said Lalezarzadeh, “I certainly don’t want to be the fate-maker of people’s lives,” so acting quickly became the obvious path. “My parents let me be exactly who I was”—even when, at age fifteen, she had to kiss two boys for the role of Ado Annie in the musical Oklahoma.

The first role that deeply resonated with her came a year later: Anne in The Diary of Anne Frank, the story of a German-born Jewish girl who documented her life hiding from Nazi persecution through her diary. Lalezarzadeh’s own Persian-Jewish mother fled Iran in the late 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war, at a time when fear of religious persecution was high.

While Lalezarzadeh has also acted on TV on The Morning Show and Before, the project she was most focused on—perhaps the most important one to date aside from English—was a short film she wrote and performed in, In the Garden of Tulips. The title comes from the Farsi meaning of Lalezarzadeh: born in the garden of tulips.

Written as a senior thesis, the fourteen-minute short recounts the final car ride that her mother Caroline (played by Lalezarzadeh) took with her father (Iman Nazemzadeh) in the countryside of Iran.

“It’s the story I’ve wanted to tell since I was fifteen years old,” said Lalezarzadeh, who is now twenty-six. “It feels really representative of the quality of art I want to make.” After a festival circuit, the film qualified for consideration as a Best Live Action Short Film at the Oscars.

On an October evening in New York, Lalezarzadeh was on hand when Tulips was presented in a small Midtown theater for Academy Award nominators. A buoyant Lalezarzadeh didn’t seem nervous. Wearing a bright green top and her curly black hair down, she confidently greeted guests as they trickled in. 

After the screening, alongside director Julia Elihu and producer Aaron Lemle, Lalezarzadeh discussed the ways the film serves as a coming-of-age story. “My mom calls this car ride the singular moment when she was thrust into adulthood. So I wanted to examine what those final moments look like,” Lalezarzadeh said during the Q&A while holding back tears. 

She referred specifically to the short’s last scene, when Caroline has to say goodbye to her father—along with her homeland and family.

According to the smuggler’s instructions, she wasn’t allowed to hug or kiss her dad. “They could only say goodbye through their eyes,” said Lalezarzadeh, describing the tale as her mother had related it to her. “She said she could feel herself growing up from the length it took to walk away.”

“What struck me about the script was just the beautiful subtlety about it and all the emotions that existed between the dialogue,” said Elihu, a friend and long-time collaborator. “And that’s really what I wanted to encapsulate in my process of directing the film.” 

To Daravi, the cast and crew captured the moment beautifully, coinciding perfectly with how she felt back then as a young adult. “But for the first time, I was able to see it from the parent’s perspective,” said Daravi. “And the pain that a lot of us went through during my generation and my parents’ generation.” 

At the same time, she took solace in her daughter’s artistic depiction of that trauma. “It’s beautiful to watch your child who was born and raised in America have such a strong sense of her ethnicity and where her family comes from,” said Daravi.

But in an industry that’s prone to type-casting, she sometimes worries her daughter will only get cast in a narrow range of roles.

“I had that fear that I would be pigeonholed. But that hasn't been my experience,” said Lalezarzadeh. “I think I’ve made it very clear to the universe that I’m an artist first.”

While being a Persian Jew is a part of Lalezarzadeh’s identity that she loves, she said it is not the primary lens through which she sees her life. 

“So the pieces of the characters that I've taken on that happened to be Persian, it’s because I felt they were dynamic characters, full characters, full stories,” she said. “And oh, it also happens to speak to this other part of me, which is beautiful.”  

In this way, Lalezarzadeh distances herself from the contentious debate that has been roiling in the worlds of theater and film over how closely an actor’s personal identity should reflect the character they play.

“I don't want to be the ‘best Persian artist’,” said Lalezarzadeh, using air quotes. “I want to be the best artist, you know what I mean?” 

It’s fitting then that, by some poetic coincidence, “Laleh-Zar” is the name of a street in Tehran that pre-revolution was home to many theaters—a cultural hub that used to be described as Iran's Broadway.

As the Broadway run of English launches Lalezarzadeh into a new phase of her career, she reflected on her work so far.

“I feel like I’ve been taking on all these roles that are negotiating loss and hope at the same time,” she said.

Goli in particular is optimistic, but by no means is she just naive; she’s the student who doesn’t give up and becomes a little more self-aware by the end of the play.

"Playing Goli again feels like returning to my childhood bedroom. She’s familiar and comforting and I know her well,” Lalezarzadeh said. “But Knud and I have made some choices that feel more truthful to me now. When I played Goli three years ago, her voice was a bit more light and airy, but this time around, I’m playing her in my voice—and that feels more truthful."