dead languages
by Douglas Messerli
Julia Cho The Language Archive / Roundabout Theatre Company/Laura Pels
Theatre in the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre / the performance
I saw was on November 14, 2010
Presumably anyone interested in
theater is equally interested in theater's major medium, language. That does
not presume, of course, an interest in "dead languages," the focus of
the major character of Cho's play, George (Matt Letscher), who is a
linguist-scholar devoted to archiving dying languages before they disappear—at
the rate of every two weeks, if we can believe George. As any playwright might
ask, do those languages include, at some level, our daily personal
conversations?
At the moment George is attending to the last living speakers of
Elloway, who he has brought, at great expense, from some vaguely middle
European country. The major problem he discovers with this language is that the
couple, who bicker only in English—Elloway is far too lovely a language to use
for anger and argumentation, they claim—refuse to help with George's work.
Resten (John Horton) and Alta (the wonderful Jayne Houdyshell) see no point to
sharing their vocabulary: "Our world is already gone, and no amount of
talk talk talk will ever bring back" what has been lost.
Nicely (and perhaps a little predictably) paralleling this predicament,
is George's own relationship with his wife, Mary (Heidi Schreck), who is close
to giving up on the idea that George, so brilliant with languages, might ever
learn the language of love. She denies leaving all the cryptic messages that
George finds hidden in his books, shoes, pants, etc: "Love or explaining
how to use the remote control?" "Marriage or an old cardigan?"
etc. Yet her denial reveals her
inability to express her own private language of frustration, suggesting that
she is as incapable of saving her world as are Resten, Alta, and George.
The playwright, Cho, has slightly seasoned her brew with the
introduction of George's assistant, Emma (Betty Gilpin), who clearly has an
inexpressible crush on her boss, going so far as to study Esperanto, one of his
favorite languages, just to please him. She cannot seem to learn the language however,
perhaps because, as her teacher explains, she is using it for the wrong
purpose. The teacher (played also by Houdyshell) recalls that she too had a
crush on another, a Dutch woman, which resulted in a similar problem: she could
not properly express herself, and the woman left. In short, nearly all of the
characters in The Language Archive
can speak brilliantly when it comes to mundane or irritating situations, but
have little skill, like most of us, with the language of the doves.
By the middle of the play, Mary decides to leave George, Emma determines
that she will tell George of her love for him, and the strangely dressed
speakers of Elloway decamp for a plane home—all leaving the linguist utterly
confounded. What has happened to his well-ordered world?
Sometimes you feel so sad, it begins to
feel like happiness. And
you can be so happy
that it starts to feel like grief.
Despite Mary's permanent absence, Emma never does develop a love
relationship with George, who continues to work alone, lost in the syntax of
other people's lives.
Cho's play points to deeper concepts than it serves up. And the author
has somewhat disappointedly spiced it up with whimsy—what some critics,
mistakenly I believe, described as surreal or absurdist farce—that deflects the
philosophical and psychological implications of her art. The Language Archive remains, for all that, a strong parable of
what lovers—and by extension, committed believers of life—can and cannot fully
express.
New York, November 15, 2010
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera and Performance (December 2010).
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