Harlequin Production’s ‘Language Archive,’ a fantastical look at words, languages

Each season at Harlequin Productions, there is at least one play in a style one might call magic realism — a play that asks audiences to suspend their disbelief and go down the rabbit hole or across the universe.

Think of 2015’s “Recent Tragic Events,” in which a sock puppet portrayed author Joyce Carol Oates, or 2011’s “boom,” about a couple’s awkward first encounter and a global cataclysm.

“The Language Archive,” in its opening weekend, is such an offering. It’s about a man named George (frequent leading man Aaron Lamb) who studies languages and struggles with words.

“He speaks many languages, has knowledge of many others and collects recordings of the last speakers of dying languages to try to preserve them, but he can’t tell his wife what she needs to hear to keep her from leaving him,” said Scot Whitney, the play’s director and Harlequin’s managing artistic director.

“It explores the concept that we talk and we talk and we talk and we talk,” he said, “but with all these languages and huge vocabularies, it’s still impossible to express what we really feel.”

The play’s characters include the last two speakers of a dying language, a husband and wife (Russ Holm, who has played perhaps a wider range of character roles than any other Olympia actor, and Pat Sibley) who seem to have arrived from “Brigadoon.”

This proliferation of peculiar plays is not simply another of the strange coincidences that happen in so many of them. Rather, it’s thanks to Whitney — and to his late grandmother, Peggy Hamilton.

“My grandmother was a Scot, a real one, who had a very heavy brogue,” Whitney said. “She told these wonderful stories that weren’t fairy tales, but they were kind of like them, with really strange twists and turns. I just loved those stories.”

Whitney, who grew up as fan of “The Twilight Zone,” still seeks out stories that surprise, “stories that take us out of the humdrum of our own lives to crack the world open a little bit and give us a new perspective.

“That’s what theater is for,” he said. “That’s what stories are for.”

When he read “The Language Archive,” Whitney was surprised, and not just once, but consistently.

“It’s hard to describe, because it’s unique,” he said. “The play has a quality of — fantasy is not quite right, but there’s something fantastical about the events. It’s almost like a fairy tale, only it’s modern.”

Whitney and scenic designer Jeannie Beirne, who last designed the company’s ultra-modern “Hedda Gabler,” have set the play in a world that’s similar to and yet clearly not our own.

The scenes play out against projections of Beirne’s whimsical watercolor paintings. The rest of the simple set was placed on a revolving platform, making for quick transitions.

“I wanted to simplify things and move the story along while still capturing this fantastical world,” Whitney said.

He came up with the idea, inspired by the script’s reference to a French bakery so perfect it looked like a movie set.

“The scenes go really quickly, so there’s no way to build a gorgeous bakery onstage,” said Beirne, who paints murals and has shown her work at Dillinger’s Cocktails & Kitchen. “He thought the only way to capture it would be to paint a painting.”

So she created that perfect bakery and nine other backdrops, plus a few short animated sequences.

“It creates a sort of soft lovely storybook feeling,” Beirne said.

This story was originally published May 4, 2016 at 3:25 AM with the headline "Harlequin Production’s ‘Language Archive,’ a fantastical look at words, languages."