STAGE REVIEW : Balancing Memories of Father

What is it about fathers that tends to make interesting performers reach deeper? For example, Sandra Tsing Loh’s monologue, “My Father’s Chinese Wives” (the first half of “Hot Spots and Flare-Ups,” which ended Saturday as part of Highway’s “Fire in the Treasure House” performance series).

Earlier this year, Jan Munroe built his personal, impeccable performance monologue, “Nothing Human Disgusts Me,” around the life and death of his father, and Tony Abatemarco made an ungainly but equally felt dramatic eulogy called “Four Fathers.” Nothing in Loh’s piece was nearly as honorific. Instead, Loh created as delicate a balance between a loving memory and a cutting satire as any daughter or son could manage around the difficult reality called “father.”

That reality is especially, uh, challenging, as Loh’s father seems determined, at 70, to take a mail-order bride from the old country. It’s the kind of situation Amy Tan would warm to, but, in Loh’s deft blending of chatty, acerbic yet literary language and an irresistibly engaging presence, it’s a cutting, absurd comedy miles away from Tan’s domestic cuddlies.

Her sister, Caitlin, for instance, is a stiff being standing as far away from the center of the family action as possible, until it’s no longer possible to ignore the cards and handmade gifts from father’s second Chinese wife (the first, it seems, just came here to get into Hollywood). Caitlin, perhaps even more than Loh herself, is convinced that father’s marrying habits are a source of unending problems: His first wife and their mother was German, she notes, and look what a disaster that produced. What drives Loh nuts are things like father’s habit of exercising and bellowing on public beaches, wearing swimming trunks he plucked from a dumpster.

Loh’s glimpse into what the children of an eccentric endure absolutely rejected the myopic solo performance tendency toward a self-centered view. Everyone, including Wife Number Two, got a say, and Loh relished, under Brian Brophy’s direction, in the jumping around from character to character almost as much as in the surprises her family adventure turned on. Loh, long past her piano-concert-beside-freeway phase or carwash performance phase, has become a vivid deliverer of vivid writing.

Satori Shakoor’s solo piece following Loh, “Erratic Erotic Jazz,” went for a hoped-for spontaneous combustion quite apart from Loh’s meticulously crafted narrative. What began as a conversational stand-up monologue ranging from why black people talk back to movie screens to hidden motivations in the U.S. presence in Somalia turned a corner into a half-sung, half-spoken declaration of female sexual power. With Stacey McClain directing, the one didn’t really follow from the other, but it was clear that Shakoor ended up where she had wanted to be all along. But what was that big piano doing on stage, just waiting to be played?