‘Language’ kicks off TheatreWorks season
Julia Cho’s clever and moving comedy gets a first-rate production
A linguist is at a loss for the words his wife needs to hear to convince her to stay. She keeps leaving cryptic, poetic notes for her husband to find around the house and then denying that it was her. Meanwhile, the last two speakers of a dying language squabble in English because their native tongue is too sacred for such pettiness. Welcome to “The Language Archive,” a bittersweet and hilarious theatrical fable about language and love and the language of love. The cleverly wrought comedy by Julia Cho (“Aubergine,” “Office Hour”) launches TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s 50th season, which will be founding artistic director Robert Kelley’s final campaign and comes just a month after the company won the Regional Theatre Tony Award. “Language” is a marvelously clever and moving play, and director Jeffrey Lo and a knockout cast bring it to life beautifully. Andrea Bechert’s superb set looks like Ikea modular shelving gone haywire — a tall jumble of cubbies filled with books, reelto-reel recorders, file boxes and other storage solutions. Jomar Tagatac is extremely bottled up as linguist George, so much so that his entire body language looks caved in sometimes, with a nagging sense of bewildered brokenness that he doesn’t know how to express. He’s really only in his comfort zone when talking about his work to try to preserve some record of languages that are dying out around the world, but his work is so discombobulating right now that he’s totally at sea. Elena Wright has an upbeat briskness as Mary that doesn’t contradict at all how quietly miserable she is in her marriage to George. It’s simply how she gets on with her day, and how she gets on with moving on. Wright has played this role before, in Symmetry Theatre Company’s 2013 Bay Area premiere of the play at the Berkeley City Club, as well as in a bilingual English and Spanish production that Symmetry later staged in Mexico and Berkeley, and it’s fascinating to see how different the same role is in a completely different production. There’s a wonderful groundedness about her Mary here, even when she has no idea where she’s going or what’s next for her, and you get a sense that she’s in good hands with herself. There’s a love triangle of sorts, but it’s more of a straight line in which everyone is facing in the same direction. Mary leaves, George can’t get over it, and meanwhile, his assistant Emma is hopelessly in love with him. Adrienne Kaori Walters is dotingly attentive and kind as Emma, but with the nagging sadness of unrequited love. More than anyone, it’s easy to feel bad for her; she can barely even dare to hope for what she wants most. Francis Jue and Emily Kuroda are terribly funny as the endearingly eccentric old couple who can’t stop squabbling in English long enough for George to record their conversation in their legendarily musical native tongue that only the two of them know how to speak anymore. Their sniping about little things like his selfishness and her cooking blow up into screaming arguments that are hilariously uncomfortable for everyone around them. One of the funniest things in the play is just the way Jue’s Resten warns George not to eat something Kuroda’s Alta cooked. Jue also plays a couple of amusingly inquisitive travelers, and Kuroda is entertainingly overbearing and passionate as a stern Esperanto tutor. There are a couple of moments that don’t quite click, such as an overlong but clearly very important allegory that Resten tells George, but overall it’s a wonderfully resonant, sad but sweet romantic comedy that shows how easily people’s language, life or world can fall apart and how they pick up the pieces, build something new or simply go on.