Entertainment

‘Language’ doesn’t translate

A linguist speaks several languages, in cluding Esperanto — but he can’t communicate with his es tranged wife. Oh, the irony!

Said wife leaves her marriage and becomes a baker — after a kind old man she meets on a train gives her his dough starter. Get it? She starts over with a starter!

And those are just two of the many, many metaphors in Julia Cho’s “The Language Archive.” Cho rams them down our throats like a farmer force-feeding geese to make foie gras.

The communication-impaired George (Matt Letscher) works with a prim-but-pretty assistant, Emma (Betty Gilpin), who pines for him in silence. She’s learning Esperanto, but — are you ready? — even a language fabricated to facilitate international peace doesn’t help her talk to George.

Meanwhile, the last people fluent in the (made-up) Elloway language, Alta (Jayne Houdyshell) and Resten (John Horton), visit so George can record them for his archive of dying tongues.

The older, Eastern European-looking couple has flown in from their remote Ellowan village, yet happen to speak English. This makes no sense, and seems like an excuse to laugh at their endearingly mangled sentences. Cho even has them swear, because everybody knows the only thing funnier than a profane senior citizen is one who doesn’t get the dirty words quite right. (The most hilarious thing of all is a foul-mouthed grandpa pulling hip-hop moves, but at least we’re spared that.)

At a loss, director Mark Brokaw (“After Miss Julie,” “Distracted”) merely moves the actors in and out of Neil Patel’s oversize, busy set as swiftly as possible.

The cast does its best — Heidi Schreck suggests affecting melancholy as Mary, the neglected wife — but this is a losing battle. Cho was so concerned with being clever that she forgot to write characters. Here, they’re not flesh and blood but artificial constructs designed to make a point.

This would matter less if the play fully embraced its occasional surrealism — a style where psychological depth doesn’t matter as much. Instead we get the watered-down version of fantasy: whimsy.

Mary’s baking reflects the show’s central problem. Speaking of her specialties, she proudly lists lavender-chocolate and four-grain, lemon-pomegranate breads.

In playwriting as in baking, it’s best to master the basics before getting fancy.

elisabeth.vincentelli
@nypost.com