It’s Her Life, Welcome to It

Achieving marketable success as a humorist can really do a number on your sense of humor, which is one cruel paradox. When you’re cranking out work for magazines, newspapers, radio, developing something for DreamWorks or whatever, it’s no mean trick to stay observant and surprising enough to satisfy yourself, let alone anyone else. Especially if you’re dumpster-diving into your life, emerging with “the ledger of curses versus blessings,” in the words of the splendid Sandra Tsing Loh.

Loh, the teller of tales so entrancingly spun in “Aliens in America” now at the Tiffany, has already gone public with this material. An earlier version played the 1995 Solo/LA festival, prior to its off-Broadway premiere. The first of its three stories, “My Father’s Chinese Wives,” initially arrived as a short story; that piece and the second of three, “Ethiopian Vacation,” showed up subsequently on National Public Radio’s “This American Life.”

For all that, “Aliens in America” hasn’t a trace of the recycled feeling you get with so many soloists’ material.

Written and performed by Loh--a hugely charismatic presence who can hold an audience without holding it hostage--the show has been given an active, precise staging by director David Schweizer, who worked with Loh on last year’s “Bad Sex With Bud Kemp.” In a jabbing phrase or a sly grace note, Loh reveals more about family dynamics, and the glorious blob of a city informing them, than most folks create in an entire monologue.

Loh’s father, an orphaned refugee from Shanghai, met Loh’s German-born mother in 1956 Los Angeles. Loh credits her father’s shiny new Buick, a rare extravagance in the life of a monumentally thrifty (and, we learn, rageful) man, as the magic ingredient to the ensuing courtship. It took place in a “palm-fringed, swimming pool-dotted utopia lit by a sun so bright you actually started to hallucinate,” as Loh says.

Thus the Chinese aerospace engineer and the German woman in the Jackie O sunglasses got together, for better and for worse. In deliberately scrambled chronological order, “Aliens in America” relays one woman’s experience growing up Sino-German, a combination ensuring more than “rice and potatoes with every meal,” as Loh once wrote. It required negotiating two shockingly different personalities.

The first segment is perfection, in which Loh recalls her now-widowed 70-year-old father’s decision to take a Chinese wife. It culminates in a scene set at the family dinner table. Around it sits father; the adult Loh; her sister, whose resentment toward her father has simmered for decades; and Zhou Ping, Dad’s bride. (The first of his two Chinese wives didn’t work out.)

The father does not like the quality of the meat Zhou Ping has prepared. He explodes. For the children, it’s depressingly familiar--yet how the new wife handles the situation upends a lifetime of hurt feelings and bad energy. Loh’s sharp enough, and generous enough, to see a tense situation from many sides.

“Ethiopian Vacation” focuses on Loh’s elegant “fast-talking German brunet” of a mother and the Loh family’s eventful trip abroad in 1969. The third piece, “Musk,” turns Loh’s attention to her own self at age 19, her first official boyfriend (a drummer), her own galloping adulthood. Though the weakest of the show’s three segments--as performed, especially, it’s on the strident side--”Musk” is worth it simply for Loh’s impersonation of herself as a newly tough-talking college kid, swearing up a storm, but somehow timidly.

“Aliens in America” revels in paradox after paradox, large and small. In the show’s present incarnation, a familiar and established L.A. voice makes for swell company.

*

* “Aliens in America,” Tiffany Theater, 8532 Sunset Blvd. (at La Cienega), West Hollywood. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 and 7 p.m. Ends Oct. 3. $25-$32.50. (310) 289-2999. Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes.

Written and performed by Sandra Tsing Loh. Directed by David Schweizer. Set by Jason Adams. Costumes by Peter Cohen. Lighting by Rand Ryan. Sound by J Payne/Catasonic. Production stage manager Bettina Zacar.