Review: In THE LANGUAGE ARCHIVE, a Linguist Can't Find the Right Words for Love, at Portland Playhouse

Earlier this week, Twitter added 69 new emoji, for those times when a picture of a brain, a flying saucer, or an exploding head might help you express your thoughts better than words. I wonder if emoji could have helped George, the linguist at the center of Julia Cho's THE LANGUAGE ARCHIVE, communicate with his wife, Mary. Maybe if he'd sent her a heart with a bow around it, she would have stayed.

THE LANGUAGE ARCHIVE, the last show in Portland Playhouse's season, explores all of the ways language (spoken, written, nonverbal, even the language of food) both serves and fails us when it comes to human relationships. In the play, George -- a linguist who speaks several languages including the hopeful Esperanto -- can't seem to find the right words to say to his wife. While he's focused on saving a dying language by recording a conversation between its last two living speakers, his marriage dies with barely a word of protest.

Meanwhile, Mary expresses herself passive aggressively by leaving cryptic notes around the house and then denying she wrote them. George's assistant, Emma, struggles to say, even to herself, that she's in love with her boss. And Alta and Resten (the married couple who are the only remaining speakers of the fictional language Elloway), alternate between fighting bitterly in English and murmuring words of love in their gentle native tongue. Through the various dyadic relationships, Cho puts language to many different uses, with many different results.

I thought Greg Watanabe, who was most recently seen on Broadway in ALLEGIANCE, did a super job in the role of George. When he was talking about language from the linguist's perspective, he was confident and articulate. As soon as someone expressed an emotion, he took on the look of a child lost in the forest without a trail of breadcrumbs to lead him home. Aside from Watanabe, the finest performance was from Foss Curtis, who played Emma, a woman who had kept her emotions pent up so long that they were a surprise even to her. Although it really wouldn't have worked with the story and George probably wasn't the best match for her anyway, I couldn't help myself from rooting for Emma to get her man.

I was less sure about Sharonlee McLean and Victor Mack as the Ellowan couple, Alta and Resten. I enjoy both of these actors very much, but the characters themselves were unbelievable. For example, they were from a remote village in some non-English speaking part of the world. And while they spoke with accents and struggled with verb conjugation, at one point Resten uses the word "susurrations," which isn't exactly common vocabulary. And several of their exchanges seemed too contrived. The entire production might have been better served if they'd both taken it down a notch.

As an audience member, my emotional journey followed George's fairly closely. There was a heart-pounding moment early on, when he begs Mary to take back the words "I'm leaving you." Unfortunately, Mary never gets to hear his emotional outpouring because the monologue is all internal. For most of the play, however, George stands apart -- able to understand emotions in an academic sense, but unable to feel them. Whether it was director Adriana Baer's intention or not, I felt similarly distanced.

Overall, THE LANGUAGE ARCHIVE is an interesting examination of how language both contributes to -- and helps us navigate -- the messiness of human relationships. The play runs through June 11. More info and tickets here.

**Note: Portland Playhouse's usual venue is being remodeled, so this show is playing at CoHo Theatre. If you go, be sure to get there early enough to sit in the center section. The set has two levels and quite a bit of action takes place on the top level, which is difficult to see from the sides.

Photo credit: Brud Giles

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