Tala Ashe, best known for her role as Zari Tarazi (and Zari Tomaz) on DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, has received a nomination for a Drama Desk Award, which honors outstanding achievement on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and Off-Off-Broadway. The awards will be presented on June 6. Ashe’s nomination is one of five for English, the play she starred in, which centers on an English language class in Iran and a number of students in it who hope to emigrate to English-speaking countries. Ashe plays Elham, a smart and assertive student who has struggled to turn her efforts into results on the government-mandated language test.
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Ashe is nominated for Oustanding Actress in a play, a category she shares with former Preacher star Ruth Negga, who was nominated for her work in Macbeth. Ashe just wrapped a run at the Public Theatre performing in The Vagrant Trilogy.
Ashe joined the cast of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow in 2017, joining the cast in the 2017 episode “Zari.” In 2018, she became a fan-favorite after the episode “Here I Go Again,” in which her character was stuck in a time loop, and she had to relive the same day over and over (complete with overt references to Groundhog Day and the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Cause and Effect”). That year, Ashe was nominated for ComicBook.com’s Golden Issue Award for Best TV Actress, and Legends of Tomorrow won our award for Best Ensemble Cast.
In addition to Ashe’s award, English was nominated for Outstanding Play, Outstanding Director of a Play (Knud Adams), Outstanding Scenic Design For a Play (Marsha Ginsberg), and Outstanding Lighting Design For a Play (Reza Behjat).
Marjan Neshat, who starred as English teacher Marjan in the play, also earned Drama Desk’s Sam Norkin Off-Broadway Award, for her performances in both English and Sylvia Khoury’s Selling Kabul.
Here at ComicBook, we’ve been singing Ashe’s praises for years. Knud, Ginsberg, and Behjat’s work was pretty remarkable on English, too. The play took place entirely in and around a single classroom, which was built inside of a two-sided box (featuring a floor, ceiling, desks, chairs, whiteboard, and a TV with a DVD/VCR combo), which changed orientation depending on the scene. It made for an intimate experience, and grounded the story in a place that felt incredibly real, but the technical and artistic challenges of pulling it off had to be significant.
