Theater: Laura Pels Theatre at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre / 111 West 46th Street, New York, NY, 10036
Synopsis:
Roundabout commissioned The Language Archive, which won the 2010 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize awarded to an outstanding new English-language play by a woman. The Language Archive is a poignant and quirky comedy that seems to prove love is the one language that can leave us all at a loss for words. George is a man consumed with preserving and documenting the dying languages of far-flung cultures. Closer to home, though, language is failing him. He doesn't know what to say to his wife, Mary, to keep her from leaving him, and he doesn't recognize the deep feelings that his lab assistant, Emma, has for him.
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October 17, 2010: Looking to brush up your Esperanto? Make sure to grab a ticket for “The Language Archive,” a new play by Julia Cho that offers theatergoers a rare chance to acquire a phrase or two of that little-used international tongue.
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October 17, 2010: “Lately,” George (Matt Letscher) informs us, “I’ve been worried about my wife.” At this moment—the very first line of Julia Cho’s The Language Archive—we, the members of the audience, become instinctively worried about the play. Domestic milieu. Direct address. Bad signs, taken in tandem. Our worry deepens when George’s wife Mary (Heidi Schreck) speaks up: “George, I can hear you. I’m right here.” Oh, dear. When a play with a furrowed brow of a title goes cutely meta in its opening scene, trouble is most definitely on the wind.
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October 17, 2010: A linguist speaks several languages, including Esperanto -- but he can't communicate with his estranged wife. Oh, the irony!
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October 18, 2010: Exploring the intersections of language, love and loss in this Roundabout presentation, Cho strikes a couple of resonant chords. Words can fail us and everyone has their own way and difficulty in expressing what's on their minds and in their hearts.
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October 18, 2010: Julia Cho's problematic new play, The Language Archive, now at the Roundabout's Laura Pels Theatre, focuses on George (Matt Lestcher), a linguist whose words fail him in his personal life. While it's an intriguing premise, logic too often takes a backseat to language; the dialogue isn't consistently engaging, and the rules of the story are murky.
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