An entire language goes extinct every few weeks, laments George (Mark Rubin), a linguist, who finds this the saddest fact in the world. He’s made it his life’s work to preserve dying languages. Meanwhile, George’s marriage to Mary (Mary Fraser) is also dying, but he can’t find the words to save it or even to articulate its loss. Flummoxed by Mary and oblivious to the love of his assistant Emma (Marie Stewart Harmon), George slowly flounders his way to his own heart — and to the words that let it speak — in Julia Cho’s The Language Archive, onstage now in an incandescent Mad Horse production, directed by Christopher Price.

Inside his Language Archive — visualized as shelves of tall brown file boxes — George has observed and mastered many systems of communication, but the woman he loves remains a mystery to him. Mary weeps constantly, he tells us in plaintive bewilderment, describing the tears that pool in her ears and collarbones. We see her pace the rooms of their home like a ghost, taut and wary in Fraser’s portrayal. In a less guarded moment, Mary lists the reasons why she weeps, in a soliloquy that Fraser lends the build, turn, and resolve of a Shakespeare sonnet. Faced with Mary’s departure, Rubin makes subtle, deftly modulated work of George’s helpless frustration. His vexation is tetchily, twitchily comedic, until it isn’t — until he finally relents to his grief with a new and poignant quiet.