STAGE REVIEW : A Beguiling, Captivating Journey : Performance artists Barry Yourgrau and Sandra Tsing Loh’s “Two Funny” to grace the Backstage Theatre in Irvine Friday and Saturday.

Performance artists don’t often turn up in Orange County, depriving the scene of an experience that can be as expressionistic and surprising as any around. How fortunate, then, to have Barry Yourgrau and Sandra Tsing Loh’s “Two Funny” at the Backstage Theatre in Irvine this Friday and Saturday.

Presented last weekend at the Backstage and on Thursday at the San Juan Capistrano Library, “Two Funny” is not as eccentric (or self-indulgent) as much of performance art. It is beguiling.

Tsing Loh begins the evening with “ShiPOOpeE! The American Musician De-Con-structed,” a quirky, funny and often-illuminating travelogue of the musical theater. Yourgrau finishes with a reading from his collection of stories, “Wearing Dad’s Head.”

That’s it, just a reading?

Yes, but Yourgrau, a professional actor (his most visible role was as Edward Teller in Roland Joffe’s 1989 A-bomb movie, “Fatman and Little Boy”) as well as an accomplished writer, knows how to sell it.

His humorous, ironic prose is delivered with such commitment that one is almost naturally captivated. When he dwells on the sun and looks up, the urge is to follow his gaze to the darkened ceiling.

“Safari,” the story he chose for Friday’s performance, revolves around his childhood in South Africa, where his father--a proud, self-righteous and somewhat gassy man--gave him vaguely surreal lessons on hunting in the family back yard.

Yourgrau’s writing is vivid (he speaks of “the star-shot equatorial night”) and slyly comic as he recounts the expedition that took him and his dad over a suburban terrain, including the used-car lot across the street, with “expensive carrion” purchased from the store.

Tsing Loh--who once startled commuters by offering a recital on the Harbor Freeway during rush hour--works the piano aggressively and talks emphatically, pulling us into her sardonic takes on the American musical back when it “was eager, uncomplicated and fun--before Bob Fosse.”

Tsing Loh is clearly a student of musicals--she knows the history and, more important, she understands how wildly unnatural but energizing a form it can be. She lingers on the movie versions of “On the Town,” “The Music Man” and “A Chorus Line.”

Her reflections can be witty and are always slightly bent, as when she envisions a modern Las Vegas production of “On the Town” featuring “Frank Sinatra, but not the young Frank Sinatra, the old, bilious National Enquirer Frank Sinatra” singing an exhausted version of “New York, New York.”

The closing passage, where she mocks “A Chorus Line,” is derivative and not as fresh as what has come before, but we do get to see her spin through some amazingly frenetic dancing. She works hard.

They both do. And we’re luckier for it.

Barry Yourgrau and Sandra Tsing Loh perform “Two Funny” Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Backstage Theatre, 2691 Richter Ave., No. 105, Irvine. Tickets: $15. Information: (714) 972-1690.