By 
(Photo: Melissa Blackall)
What we have here with Julia Cho’s “The Language Archive” is a failure to communicate. George (Mitchell Hébert) is a master linguist yet doesn’t have the words to convey the thoughts that swirl around in his head and the emotions inside his heart. His wife Mary (Nanna Ingvarsson) has been driven to tears (lots of tears) with their marriage and has resorted to hiding passive aggressive notes of “bad poetry” lamenting about the situation. Meanwhile George’s lab assistant Emma (Katie Atkinson) has feelings for her boss and struggles with the decision to tell George how she feels about him. At the center of it all are Resten (Edward Christian) and Alta (Kerri Rambow), a married couple that are the last two speakers of a dying language. George and Emma are tasked with the job of documenting the language for posterity- better said than done when the long-married couple decide to stop talking to each other.
Forum Theatre’s production of The Language Archive has a sitcom premise, but the comedy is smarter than most Heigl-esque dreck.