October 01, 1998
How Far Can Loh Go?:
by Rob
Kendt
When I first met Sandra Tsing Loh in the spring of 1987, she was
working as a teaching assistant in a "thematic option" program for
exceptionally bright underclassmen at USC while she toiled at her own Ph.D. in
English. Her reputation had spread as the kind of cool young T.A. who
semi-fraternized with the students, and who had them do things like mount
performance art pieces as their midterms.
I wasn't part of that special program for geniuses but counted a
few among my friends, and thus happened to swing an invite to a term's-end
soiree at Loh's Pasadena apartment. I remember little about the party except
how maddeningly brilliant everyone was, not least my hostess, who, I was
informed, was a kind of L.A. Renaissance womanÑa writer and journalist who
happened to have a degree in physics from CalTech, who wrote quirky
neo-classical music (like a suite to be played on your tape deck as you drove
through a Valley car wash), and who apparently dished up a unique performance
art salad of all of the above at local clubs and theatres.
I've been a bit nonplussed by Loh's extraordinary and inspiring
success since then. It's not the number of times she has turned up in the last
decade that has given me pause, but where she's turned upÑas the performer of
such meta-cabarets as ShipOOpeE, a deconstruction of the American
musical; as the writer of the column "The Valley" in the late Buzz magazine,
later culled into the definitive comic classic Depth Takes a Holiday; as the
humorous, often manic narrator of "The Loh Life" on National Public
Radio, and as the one-woman writer/performer of such shows as Aliens in
America, about her German mother and her Chinese father, which played
Off-Broadway and at various Southland theatres.
Loh's success as a humorist and personality has reached a point,
she admitted in a recent interview at Greenblatt's Deli, that she is at last
finding ways to do all the things she set out to do years ago, when, she said,
"I was trying to do everything." She was by turns a playwright, a fiction
writer, a composer, and a performance artist. Now, in addition to writing and
recording her NPR pieces, she finds an outlet for her music by scoring
documentaries; in addition to her book of essays, she published a novel, If
You Lived Here, You'd Be Home by Now, in 1995, and she's currently
developing a network sitcom about modern dating, a pet subject about which
she's written with hilarious, often harrowing frankness and perception.
And she's opening this weekend in Bad Sex With Bud Kemp at the
Tiffany Theatre in West Hollywood, a one-woman exploration of desperate
singlehood (well behind herÑshe's happily married) directed by L.A. theatre
maestro David Schweizer after its successful Off-Broadway run.
"You imagine a certain career ladder, but it's never going to
be that ladder," she said, looking back on her dual if dovetailing careers
as a performer and a writer. "You never know where the rungs are going to
be."
Indeed, in the 1980s, around the time she was at USC, she was
working to be a playwright and a famous fiction writer a la Tama Janowitz or
Bret Easton Ellis. But then came the music/performance art career, which led to
such memorable stunts as playing a grand piano on a flatbed truck in rush hour
traffic on the Harbor Freeway, or leading a 35-piece orchestra to accompany a
grunion run in Malibu.
Loh's solo cabaret and theatre shows, meanwhile, took a page from
her advanced English studies to "deconstruct" everything from
Broadway musicals to Stravinsky. "It was a Victor Borge act," Loh
said. Soon she found herself talking onstage between pieces more and moreÑa
performance exigency which coincided with her revelation that the arts-grant
gravy in early '90s L.A. was flowing to "multicultural" theatre,
especially autobiographical one-person shows.
Thus was another solo performer bornÑthough not without some
cultural correction.
"Here I was doing these Eurocentric drag shows about Oklahoma! and The
Rite of Spring," she said. "I couldn't get a grant from an Asian
theatre festival or from a women's theatre festival; it was not standup comedy,
it wasn't music. I could not have fallen through more cracks.
"Finally, Dan Kwong invited me to be part of an Asian theatre
festival at Highways. I was working really hard at orchestrating my own pieces,
practicing the pianoÑand seeing a lot of autobiographical one-person shows
about people's multicultural backgrounds. Now, I was also a short story writer,
and I had all these stories about my Chinese father, and I thought, Well, I
could get up and tell something like that, and I wouldn't have to kill myself
practicing the piano."
Aliens in America and My Father's Chinese Wives were two
pieces that came of Loh's "multicultural" period and boosted her
profile in the "bastardized form" of solo theatre, in which she
admitted the long-term success stories tend to be artists like Spalding Gray,
Danny Hoch, John Leguizamo, Holly Hughes, or Rick Reynolds, who have developed
a "sort of cult of personality," as well as the requisite sense of
narrative structure and such indispensible tricks as "fake intimacy"Ñfaux-confidential
lead-ins like, "OK, I'll tell you this terrible secret, but just this
one."
Meanwhile, a career in freelance journalism that began with music
reviews in L.A. Weekly landed her at the L.A. magazine Buzz, where she
wrote her beloved monthly column on her "schlubby" life of creative
struggle and inconspicuous consumption in the far San Fernando Valley.
From her current semi-famous vantage point, she can look back
happily on the scrappy climb that has spanned the years since she was
encouraging young fellow geniuses at USC and now.
"In the guerrilla campaign to be an artist, you take any form
that comes along," she said in summation. "I had to narrow what I do
into a genre to get my foot in the door. Now..." The possibilities, if not
endless, have multiplied. "I'm just amazed that I have a roof over my
head, and I don't have to pay to make creative work."