26-03-2025
‘English' star Hadi Tabbal brings his own immigrant experience to Broadway to portray a man ‘stuck between two worlds'
Hadi Tabbal made his Broadway debut in the Pulitzer Prize winning play English by Sanaz Toossi. His character Omid is one of several Iranian adults who spend their time in an English class and must navigate how he is perceived by others based on what language leaves his lips. After finishing the play's successful limited engagement at Roundabout Theatre Company, Tabbal joined Gold Derby to discuss how he was able to pour his own experiences into the script's examination of cross-cultural identities.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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Gold Derby: I was struck by one of your lines in the play: 'Do you ever think about who you would be if you weren't sure whether you were staying or leaving every day?' How does that concept of shifting identity resonate with you?
Hadi Tabbal: I grew up in Lebanon. I came to the States as an adult immigrant. I don't know if I'm the only Lebanese ever on Broadway, or one of two. And that line carries an experience in it that is very hard to explain to people, but you get it when you watch the play. Sometimes you are born in situations where you don't ever have to navigate who you are based on where you are or where you want to go. But as immigrants, as Middle Easterners, as someone who's been through that experience, as people who straddle different cultures or two cultures … that is very much embedded in your story. Because you're always thinking of either leaving or staying. There are consequences for that on your own psyche and on how you sound and on who you are around. So there is a certain weight that we carry in this play, of how we always have to think of ourselves as people who are going to be defined by where we end up.
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It raises this question of what is lost when we aren't speaking in our native tongue. As someone who speaks multiple languages, did this experience make you reflect on what parts of yourself have perhaps changed over time?
Absolutely… I speak French, English, Italian, Arabic, Lebanese, and some Spanish. And I've always felt that we are different people when we speak different languages. If I bust out in French right now, I would sound like a very different person. So you're always navigating identities based on how you sound. When I came here, I had to take accent reduction classes because when I started working, it was almost impossible to work if you had an accent. And that kind of opened up a lot of opportunities, but also erased a lot of who I am because I was never allowed to embrace what I sound like as an adult. I had to Americanize. And that is all there in this play. I play a character who is stuck between two worlds who doesn't know where they belong. And I feel these things every day. I have a bit of an accent, but it's almost indiscernible. But also when I go back home, I sound American and I feel like I'm out of place, but then I sometimes shy away from speaking Arabic in front of Americans because I just don't want to open that chapter. I don't want them to see me in that light. So there is ingrained shame, there is also taking the easy route. All of these things are dynamics that are in this play, which is why I love it so much.
The actors used, or dropped, an accent to delineate when someone is speaking in English or Farsi. What did that bring up for you?
One experience that has been constant is this idea of feeling rejected wherever you land. There is a scene between my character and Marjan's character, the teacher, where I give her a little gift and at a certain point she tells me: you're from there, you're not like me. And that always hurts every night because you are trying so hard to belong at home and you're rejected because you are not really from home. And you try so hard to belong where you're going and you're also rejected because you're not from there. And so a lot of the vulnerabilities that opened up every night have been very much rooted in my personal life. As artists, that's what we do when we're on stage. We just put our hearts out there for audiences to consume, for lack of a better word, but I do it happily. And so I think your blood is out there on the stage, your heart, your experiences, all your vulnerabilities.
You still have family in Lebanon. I have to imagine that makes the subject of the play feel more immediate to you. What was it like performing this story after the ceasefire was declared?
I'm grateful for that question because the longer I live in the US, the more I feel like I'm an American, but also the more I feel like I'm an immigrant. And maybe because now I have a child and my relationship with my parents is a bit stronger because I have a child and I've been going more often to Beirut. But doing this play while in today's world. … I won't lie to you, if there was no ceasefire in Lebanon before rehearsals, I don't know how I would've done this. It would be very hard to know that there's bombs in the background when you talk to your parents and then be on Broadway. Those are incredibly different experiences. But being able to tell the story of being an in-betweener when I know exactly what it's like to be an in-betweener has been invaluable for me. This is where I'm grateful for artistic opportunities that allow me to put myself in the art and the art in me.
I can't name many plays that have been produced on Broadway that are specifically about Middle Eastern actors telling Middle Eastern stories, but you got to be part of one in your debut. What does that mean to you?
I'm trying to process it. I'll tell you this: When you are an Arab actor or an Iranian actor like me who started years ago, the stuff I used to read for and have done has been abominable in terms of what was open for us. I mean, you play terrorists, you play the translator of terrorists, you play the good nephew of the terrorists. You're always in that light. You're an outsider. You have some nondescript thick accent that they want you to do. I've lived in New York all my life now, my adult life, and I walk around midtown and it's like, plays don't represent you. They don't have anything to do with you. Whereas I am not an outsider to the American experience, but somehow the American experience on the stage has been very not accessible to me. So to be in this play on Broadway for me is huge. And I think it's huge for all the other actors because I could have been yet another cardboard character in some play and still been on Broadway. But to play an Iranian with grace and with kindness, and to be able to mirror the experiences of Americans as a Middle Eastern actor in my Broadway debut, truly the stars aligned in a way that is so hard to believe for me.
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