‘Bad Sex With Bud Kemp’ Is a Good Time

In the tiny Second Stage Theatre on the Upper Westside here, Sandra Tsing Loh lays out the rules as she experienced them in her own dating life. One man teaches her never to call him in the time between their two-date-a-month allotment, a rule she obediently repeats out loud for him when they say goodbye: “You call me. I will never call you.”

For a single woman in her 30s, the path to forced intimacy is studded with humiliation, irony, pockets of desperation, hope, sex. People size each other up too quickly and too efficiently, all the while attempting to convey an aura of nonchalance. It’s a bruising process, and Loh is an aggressively funny chronicler of the wounded pride and pride wounding that line the trenches of adult dating, where “men are tired of being single but too tired to get married.”

Her one-woman show, “Bad Sex With Bud Kemp,” opened Sunday night. Director David Schweizer packages the show in well-chosen music and lighting cues, which expertly set off her high-strung persona. When Loh dates an architect named Robert Blair, who shows her around his terrific apartment (“Robert Blair is in move-in condition!”), she opens the door on the pristine bathroom. A shot of light conveys the opening onto this celestial site, while a classical piano piece (nothing too overstated) gently announces its glory, and Loh sobs, “I’m home!”

Unfortunately, the good-looking and cultured Robert Blair fails to return our Sandra’s enthusiastic signals. When she floats the suggestion that they go to the opera together, he lets the idea die in the air as if it were a germ.

Loh’s persona is well known to listeners of “The Loh Life,” her series of commentaries on National Public Radio, and from her other solo shows and essays. An updated, less victimized Dorothy Parker, she pitches her energy and voice high and taut in this 90-minute evening. Loh never relaxes onstage ever, giving her tales from the dating front line a push more desperation than they need. And Loh occasionally falls vocally into comedic cliches--shades of the Tori Spelling parody from “Saturday Night Live” make unnecessary appearances.

If you wish Loh could relax a little bit more, it’s because her phrases are frequently delicious, and her stories so well observed, that at times they are riotously funny. This is the case when she stops chasing snooty architects and goes slumming--dating Tony the Pony, a parking lot valet and welterweight boxer. Sex binds them together, and sex only, which she enacts deliriously, evoking just how wrong it all is and how mismatched they are. Inevitably, after another evening of watching boxing on television, Tony the Pony is sent packing.

A ponytailed Loh looks fit, slim and limber in slacks and a sleeveless blouse (according to the program, this is not a costume but clothes designed by Peter Cohen). “Bad Sex,” with a bare but efficient set and lights by Ken Adams, chronicles Loh’s Manhattan adventures, before she took up residence on the West Coast (where she is an occasional contributor to the Los Angeles Times).

*

Bud Kemp, the man of the title, is an old friend that Loh works with at a pharmaceutical company. Like his name, he is dependable if less than inspiring; Bud Kemp has a “beaten quality,” is “pear-shaped” and “a tireless listener and a lender of money.” Still, Loh entertains a nagging question, expressed in a voice bright with the exaggerated cheerfulness of a camp counselor: “Could this Bud Kemp be used for sex?”

A subsequent back rub, in which Bud’s part of the conversation sounds to her like, “Blah, blah, blah, me, me, me,” ends in an awkward embrace that finds them “grappling like circus bears.” Bud Kemp is used and disposed of and then makes a surprise reappearance late in the play. By then it doesn’t really matter that his return is not especially convincing. Loh is so good at turning “blah, blah, blah, me, me, me” into gold that Bud Kemp could turn out to be the pope. It would still be entertaining.

“Bad Sex With Bud Kemp,” Second Stage Theatre, 2162 Broadway at 76th Street. (212) 787-3392.