The Language Archive

Sometimes what we don’t say is just as important—or catastrophic—as what we do say. At least, that’s the undercurrent running through The Language Archive by Julia Cho, currently in production at Big Idea Theatre.

George (Eason Donner) is a bookish fellow who begins by telling us that his wife, Mary (the luminous Jessa Berkey) is suffering from sadness. Unable to make him understand why she is so sad, she has begun leaving him notes—a strange form of poetry—on scraps of paper stuffed where he will find them. When she tells him she is leaving him, he finds it impossible to say what he feels.

The irony is that George is a linguist, a professor at The Language Archive, where he records, stores and studies languages that are disappearing as their native speakers die out. He’s aided by Emma (Elizabeth Holzman), who has fallen quietly, desperately in love with him. Their latest project is an elderly married couple (Shaleen Schmutzer-Smith and Scott Divine) who are the last native speakers of Elloway. Unfortunately, they are fighting—and they only fight in English, a language “good for hatred.”

Yes, it’s funny—uproariously so, at moments—but it’s also sad and heartwarming.

George’s inability to express emotion is pushed to the limit, while Emma struggles to identify and give voice to her own feelings. Directed by Benjamin T. Ismail and with a fantastic, flexible set designed by Brian Watson, The Language Archive takes us on a journey through the relationship between words and feelings.

It is only in the play’s final moments that the story stumbles, when the playwright seems to have been unable to resist the urge to tie up every loose end in an epilogue that diminishes some of the power that comes from watching people struggle through the middle of their lives. If we learn anything at all from narrative language, it’s that people—like words—resist tidy endings.

That flaw in the play aside, this production—and the stellar work by Donner, Berkey and Holzman—keeps the magic in the magical realism while still taking us to that most inarticulate of places: the center of the human heart.