Julia Cho’s “The Language Archive” is a play with a lot going on. It evokes marital cliches like fighting over the window seat on a plane, bad cooking and taking out the trash. But it also conveys some real ideas about what it means to love and communicate, creating a mix of humor and sentimentality.
George is a linguist who speaks many languages but can’t find the words to convince his wife not to leave him. He operates a language archive with recordings of languages that are about to become extinct. What’s at stake for George with these dying languages are entire worlds—both whole cultures, such as the soon to be extinct mythic culture and language Elloway, and the “world” of colloquialisms, gestures, inside jokes and tacit agreements unique to every loving couple.
He bemoans that the language he speaks at home with his wife, Mary, is about to become extinct, but there may be hope if he can find a way to express himself.
On the day Mary leaves George, the last two speakers of Elloway, an aged married couple, Resten and Alta, arrive. But they’ve had a falling out and refuse to fight in the native tongue they’re supposed to be archiving, saying that English is the best language for anger.
Meanwhile, George’s assistant, Emma, is hopelessly in love with him to the point where she’s learning an obscure language to impress him while George’s soon-to-be ex-wife starts a new life.
Resten and Alta (played by Tony Amendola and Linda Gehringer) steal the show through their humorous bickering, and, once they finally make up, by their offering of sage advice about marriage and love to the more clueless characters on stage.
Cho recently was awarded the Susan Smith Blackburn prize for “The Language Archive,” which is making its debut at South Coast Repertory.
—Emily Weisburg
