Kinder, Gentler Performance Art Featured in 7-Part Series With Separate Casts, Themes

“A Freeway Home Companion” is not quite performance art. It’s not quite theater. It’s something in-between.

“A lot of performance artists berate the audience, throw things on them,” said Sandra Tsing Loh, one of the two hosts in the program of solo works opening tonight at Theatre/Theater in Hollywood. “We want the audiences here to be comfortable. It’s kinder, gentler performance art--like ‘Come into our living room, relax.’ It’s not stand-up, not necessarily autobiographical. We have tales about dogs, families, lots of humor. It’s as if we took ‘The Prairie Home Companion’ and put it in L. A.”

Each of the seven performances will feature a new cast and a separate theme.

The lineup for tonight’s show, titled “Arts of the Atlantic Rim,” will include Loh, co-host Mel Green, Gracie Harrison, Maxaynne Lewis, Susan Marder, Lee Rosenthal, Chambers Stevens and Shelley Berman in a special appearance. “Some pieces are 30 seconds long, some are 30 minutes, some recur,” Loh said. “But they’re all monologues--people performing their own writing.”

The series continues with “The Tattered Palms Gazette: A Living Journal of Our Neighborhood” on Nov. 3, “Fear and Loathing of Hunter S. Thompson” on Nov. 10, “The Emerging Caucasian Heterosexual Male Performance Workshop” on Nov. 17, “The Best of 1990s Grant Rejectees” on Nov. 25, “The Not-Ready-for-PBS-Players Present a Vaguely Multicultural Underfunded Event” on Dec. 8 and “I’m Dreaming of an Orange Christmas” on Dec. 15.

Loh and Green, who count themselves among the “vaguely multicultural” (she’s Asian-German, he’s Hawaiian-Irish) have enlisted an eclectic roster for the series, including Linda Albertano, Jan Munroe, Steven Banks and Lotus Weinstock--a range of monologuists, comedians and performance artists. Although Loh herself is uncomfortable with the performance-art label, saying “I hate to perform, I love to write,” she has made quite a name for herself with a collection of attention-getting arts events.

For example, “Spontaneous Demographics,” Loh’s 1987 piano concert for commuters, took place under the Harbor Freeway. At the peak of “Self Promotion,” her 1988 recital at the Hollywood Roosevelt, “a person threw out 1,000 $1 bills over my head, and everyone stampeded,” she said. “Night of the Grunion” in Malibu saw their run serenaded by the 35-piece Topanga Symphony in ’89. And at 1990’s “Music at the Bonus Carwash,” patrons paid $15 to sit in their cars and listen to Loh’s music cassette.

“A lot of my performances were very large-scale, big spectacles,” Loh admitted. She has since eschewed such splashy, expensive efforts--each event cost between $1,500 and $2,500--and jazz clubs (“all that clinking of glasses and silverware”) for the theater setting; on a double bill with Barry Yourgrau last year at Theatre/Theater, Loh won raves for “ShiPOOee! The American Musical Deconstructed.”

Loh, 29, was born in Newport Beach, grew up all over the world, got her bachelor’s degree in physics from Caltech and her master’s in English at USC.

A native of Odessa, Tex., Green, 38, “got the accent beaten out of me during my years in New York,” he said. He is a former writer for “Saturday Night Live,” which he terms “a great career thing, but an excruciating job.” In Los Angeles since 1983, he has written two humor books, “Smart Women, Stupid Books,” a satire on how-to-get-over-a-relationship books, and “Dudes: The Cult of Cool.” His latest, “Professional Nightmares,” is due out next year.

Green, whose acclaimed solo work “Back to the Big O” played earlier this year at Theatre/Theater, will perform at least seven pieces in the series, including “Panther Burn” (about visiting a friend’s plantation on the Mississippi Delta and living with him for a summer), “Hector and the He/Shes” (on the dark underbelly of Hollywood), “Violence” (on the dilemma of masculinity) and “Alocasia” (about a relationship gone bad). Any relationship to fact is strictly intentional, said the writer: “These are my life experiences.”