PERFORMANCE ART : Absorbing World of ‘Aliens’ Kicks Off Fest

Soundstage 11 at CBS Studio Center in Studio City is vast, with ceilings as high as a cathedral’s. As a theatrical venue, it might be ideal for an epic with a cast of hundreds. Instead, for the next three weeks Soundstage 11 is the home of a solo performance festival, “Solo/LA.”

But the disparity between the size of the space and the size of the show didn’t much matter on Tuesday, when the festival began with Sandra Tsing Loh’s “Aliens in America.” The audience was seated close enough to Loh to forget how big the room is. And Loh’s three-part monologue was so funny and absorbing that it was easy to ignore the surroundings and simply enter Loh’s world.

It’s a world in which everyone feels, at times, like an alien in America. The first story, “My Father’s Chinese Wives,” relates how Loh’s widowed Chinese father advertised for new brides in the old country, and ended up bringing two of them (not at the same time) to America. Loh plays all of the above, plus her older sister, who has been long estranged from their father and regards each new turn of the tale with icy sarcasm. Loh joins in much of the skepticism but ends her story with a warmhearted burst of feeling.

The second story, “Ethiopian Vacation,” goes back to 1969, when Loh was 6. It focuses on her German mother, a determined woman who gaily tries to keep up her family’s spirits even as they are launched on a dangerous nine-hour bus ride in war-torn Ethiopia, where they have ventured as, yes, tourists. Their vacation is as hilarious as it is harrowing, and here we also learn how this remarkably disparate couple got together in the first place. They were swept together by a Buick and the promise of a fresh start in ‘50s Los Angeles. Apparently they lived to regret it.

In the final chapter, “Musk,” Loh remembers returning home after her first year in college, when her parents struck her as stranger than ever. Yet in a devastating social encounter with some of her own acquaintances, it’s Loh who suddenly feels like a space alien.

After spending most of the 90-minute evening as an observer, Loh puts herself on the hot seat. It’s an important and gracious step, marred only slightly by an ending that seems slightly abrupt and inconclusive.

Loh is an irresistible raconteur. Too bad each program in the festival lasts only two days--the festival moves on to Monica Palacios’ “Latin Lezbo Comic” tonight and Friday and to 10 other stars of L.A.’s solo performer circuit through May 6, followed by a program of “new voices” on May 7.

* “Solo/LA,” CBS Studio Center, 4024 Radford, Studio City. Tuesdays-Sundays, 8 p.m., with scattered matinees and late-night shows. Call (213) 565-1034 for schedule and (213) 466-1767 for reservations.