Nelson Mashita, Ryun Yu, Jennifer Chang and Jeanne Sakata in "The Language Archive"
“When we started rehearsals for The Language Archive,” director Jessica Kubzansky recalls, “I did an experiment.”
Some of the characters in Julia Cho’s play, opening Wednesday at East West Players, either study or speak dying languages — which was the inspiration for Kubzansky’s experiment.
“I wanted all of us to understand what it means to catalog dying languages and how significant that is.” So on the first day of work on the play — as five actors, three understudies, a stage manager, an assistant stage manager, and an assistant director all sat around a table — Kubzansky asked everyone in the room to “talk about any languages that your grandparents spoke that you don’t speak or that your parents spoke and you no longer speak.’”
Jessica Kubzansky
The results? “There were probably eight or nine languages that this generation no longer speaks, from Japanese to Korean to various Filipino dialects to Lakota to Yiddish…. I then understood what an important thing it is, to catalog the uniqueness of a language that represents a culture. It was viscerally brought home to me by the loss of languages just around that table. That’s really tangentially what the play is about.”
In Cho’s play, Kubzansky says, “George, the protagonist, is a linguist, a master of languages, who finds and meets with speakers of languages who are the last of their kind. He records their language for posterity and by extension their culture. Yet George cannot express his love for his wife and ends up losing her. It’s about unrequited love and people going on journeys and finding themselves, discovering what is true, and what it means to really communicate.”
It’s “a whimsical, romantic comedy,” Kubzansky continues, “that is at the same time really moving and poignant.” Parts of its are written in the style of magical realism, and “in some ways it’s a magically real play that’s completely true…I also think there’s a delicious irony in the fact that the play is about a man who catalogs languages yet doesn’t know how to communicate with his wife. There’s no question that a little bit of the Mars/Venus axis is explored.”
She goes on. “It discusses the ways in which languages work, how methods of communication survive or die, and what that means. The play expresses the idea that there’s a language that is particular to a unique set of individuals and when they go, the language goes — that’s really a profound idea.”
Kimiko Gelman and Nelson Mashita
Kubzansky gave an example from her own experience. “My brother and sister and I made up a language around my dog called Tzig that we still speak. No one in the world speaks it but us, so when we disappear, the language will disappear as well. We’re passing it on to my nieces and nephews, but they won’t really know it.
“The passionate, heartfelt beats in the play have a lot to do with moments that are singularly life-changing,” Kubzansky says. She calls The Language Archive “a play about cataclysmic epiphanies. Which I know actually sounds potentially counter-intuitive because epiphanies are, in theory, small revelations. The drama of the play is not, someone gets murdered or people get shot but the small revelations about big pieces of our own humanity. ”
Two of the characters, Alta and Resten, speak a language created by the playwright, called Ellowan. “But you’re able to understand what they’re saying from the context. And there are a couple of sections where you’re just left to imagine what they’re saying…It’s very exciting to hear the actors speak and inflect a made-up language.” The exact location of their country is never identified. “Julia absolutely does not want us to be able to locate these people as from anywhere,” Kubzansky says. “The whole point of Elloway is that it’s so obscure that we don’t recognize it in any way.”
Jennifer Chang and Jeanne Sakata in "The Language Archive"
Even L.L. Zamenhof, the inventor of the artificial, international language Esperanto, makes an appearance, although he died in 1917. “One of the characters gets on a train and has an encounter with Zamenhof.” Kubzansky says, “In this play, that’s possible. Perhaps she’s dreaming him but in fact, she interacts with him.”
The play premiered at South Coast Repertory in April 2010, but this is the first time it has been performed by an Asian American cast. “I know that Julia is very excited about having an Asian American cast,” Kubzansky says. Although Cho was born in LA, her parents were recent Korean immigrants. “I think, for Julia, as an Asian American, the world is being seen through the lens of her experience. But the ethnicity is not the thing that’s relevant,” she adds.
Kubzansky talks about her ongoing relationship with playwright Cho. “Chay Yew first
introduced me to Julia when he was in charge of the Asian American Theatre Lab at the Mark Taper Forum.” (He is presently artistic director of the Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago.) “Chay had seen work of mine and he had seen work of Julia’s and so he put us together. I have a lot of really wonderful history with Julia. I love working with her. She’s a glorious playwright. I had the privilege of working on one of her first plays, 99 Histories, in a development workshop. And I worked with Julia on developing her play BFE at the Portland Center Stage as part of a new play development program. My theater, Boston Court, produced the world premiere of Julia’s play The Winchester House” in 2006, staged by Yew. Kubzansky is co-artistic director of Theatre @ Boston Court.
Nelson Mashita and Jeanne Sakata
Yew directed Cho’s Durango for East West Players in 2007. Kubzansky staged East West’s next production after Durango – Jeanne Sakata’s Dawn’s Light: The Journey of Gordon Hirabayashi. It was Kubzansky’s first association with the company, she recalls. “One of the biggest privileges about working on that play was the opportunity to meet this man Gordon Hirabayashi, who was a hero to me. When Japanese Americans were being interred after Pearl Harbor, he was one of three people who said ‘it’s not constitutional and I refuse to go to an internment camp’. He was put in jail and they took his case to the Supreme Court and he lost. Some years later, documents came to light that revealed that in fact there was no military necessity for the incarceration of Japanese Americans, that it was racial-based fear.” Hirabayashi’s case “was taken back to the Supreme Court and Hirabayashi’s conviction was overturned.”
Kubzansky’s future commitments include The 39 Steps, at La Mirada Theatre in January. “It’s film noir good fun. And then I’m doing a world premiere of a play at the Theatre @ Boston Court called The Children, by Michael Elyanow, that opens in May. It’s about what happens if someone from Medea’s time wrests her children away from their mother’s murderous intent and transports them to present day Maine in the middle of a hurricane.”
Jennifer Chang and Ryun Yu
When asked what audiences will take away from The Language Archive, Kubzansky says, “I hope the audience leaves the play smiling with a little pang in their hearts asking what the definition of love is, what the definition of a satisfying life is, what are the languages we all use. And what it’s like to let go of something and what is it like to hang onto something…It doesn’t tie things up in a neat bow. You won’t walk out going ‘oh life is like a box of chocolates’. It’s a little more complex and open-ended. It’s as complex and un-bowed and unbuttoned as real life.”
The Language Archive opens Wednesday, November 9, and plays through December 4. David Henry Hwang Theater at the Union Center for the Performing Arts, 120 Judge John Aiso St. Los Angeles. Wed-Sat 8 pm, Sun 2 pm. 213-625-7000. http://eastwestplayers.org.
***All The Language Archive production photos by Michael Lamont
