BURNING BRIDGES
It takes a brave soul to speak out about getting back at those who got you cancelled, especially when the names that are blamed can theoretically destroy any chance of continuing in your chosen profession. But that is exactly what Sandra Tsing Loh is doing in her latest work-in-progress, I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Come to It, directed by David Schweizer. It’s the first piece in the Odyssey Theatre’s new Thresholds of Invention initiative, a series of plays-in-development under the expert guidance and curation of longtime actor/writer/director/theatre artist Tony Abatemarco. The workshop production plays November 16 and 23, 2024, at 8. In addition to I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Come to It, Loh has also put together A Post-Apocalyptic Home Companion, a twisted, live-radio style musical variety show in the style of Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, at Sunday, November 17 at 2.
Loh’s potentially self-immolating tell-all — a “gossipy, rip-snorting, no-prisoners-taken tale” — is about the emotionally exhausting experience of producing and touring her play Madwomen of the West. She’s always written and performed her own material herself; this was the first time she had written for others.
Her first big splash in LA was during the 1987 Los Angeles Fringe Festival when she played a rented grand piano on the roof of the Seventh Place Garage next to the Harbor Freeway for the benefit of drivers stuck in rush hour traffic. The author of seven books and a contributing editor for The Atlantic, she’s performed at Geffen Playhouse, Broad Stage, South Coast Rep, Seattle Rep, Pasadena Playhouse, and Berkeley Rep, to name just a few. But say her name, and most people will associate her with her public radio commentaries on Morning Edition (NPR), The Loh Down (KCRW), and the syndicated The Loh Down on Science on LAist/NPR, formerly KPCC, where she was my former colleague when I produced arts stories for NPR (and by the way, she’s a CalTech physics grad, too!).
She was infamously cancelled by KCRW when, in an early Sunday morning commentary, she let an F-bomb drop into her piece, one of the seven dirty words that can get a broadcast license withdrawn. It was just a mistake by two people, Loh and the sound engineer, both exhausted beyond belief for different reasons, but it caused an enormous First Amendment uproar and generated massive negative publicity for the station. She wasn’t reinstated, the engineer kept his job.
Sandra Tsing Loh (photo by Ben Gibbs)
Madwomen revolves around four women of a certain age — friends since college now in their 70s — gathering for the “the birthday brunch from hell,” during which all aspects of their now post-menopausal lives are on the table. Writing it during the pandemic and the Writers Guild strike gave Loh access to actors who might not otherwise be available.
She gathered friends on Zoom and put together a top-notch cast of Caroline Aaron (Shirley in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), Marilu Henner (Taxi), Melanie Mayron (Thirtysomething, The Serpent Queen) and JoBeth Williams (Kramer vs Kramer, The Big Chill).
The play was slated to be part of the first-season of all-female playwrights at the Center Theatre Group’s Mark Taper Forum. This came about, Loh told me in a phone interview, when playwright Jeremy O. Harris, noting that almost all of his season’s plays were written by men, told CTG he would withdraw his Tony-nominated Slave Play unless women playwrights got a season of their own. They did, and Madwomen was initially part of the line-up.
Between COVID closures destroying attendance, the number of plays continually being whittled down, budget cuts, upheaval within CTG and demands that Loh replace the all-white female cast with at least one black woman, Madwomen was ultimately shelved.
But she was determined to produce the play herself, found backing, and figured out some clever ways of making it look like this hot new play was going to completely sell out. When it actually did, it was extended for an impressive profit-making success at The Odyssey.
Building on that success, she decided to try it Off-Broadway, where JoBeth Williams, who was called away to shoot a film, was replaced by Brooke Adams (Terence Malick’s Days of Heaven). Elaine May and Marlo Thomas were in the front row and a host of other well-known A-listers came to see the play. After New York came London, which wasn’t quite as successful, and left a financial hole in her pocket.
Loh’s youngest child, now a Berkeley graduate, came out as non-binary at around age 16 and has been transitioning ever since. Writing about her reaction to this change in her child’s life, a 2019 version of Madwomen was thrown out of the Ojai Playwright’s Conference because, during a library reading of the play, one young playwright said that they didn’t feel they were in a safe place and declared it “transphobic.”
“Now we’re in a world where when NPR talks about Planned Parenthood, they can’t even say ‘women’s rights,’ it’s ‘people who can get pregnant.’ Even The Vagina Monologues is being cancelled because it’s about women. It’s like everyone has their rights, trans people should totally have their rights, but women have to apologize for being women or for even using the word ‘women.’
“I came out of a generation of boomer icons, many of whom trace their roots to playwright Wendy Wasserstein (The Heidi Chronicles, The Sisters Rosensweig), who wrote almost exclusively about women of a certain age. And then there is the amazing statistic that about 60% of American ticket buyers are women aged 50 and older, and how often do you see women as real characters, just owning the stage, not as mothers or grandmothers, but as their own people. Who is writing for them?”
In a play like Loh’s, where four women talk about all the things that happened to them as career professionals, mothers, wives, and partners, the impact of Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016, and marking the 50th anniversary of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Loh questions what feminism even means anymore. “Being a woman has changed a lot in 50 years,” she said.
Her resilience and clever marketing campaign, posing the actors in a Warhol-esque graphic quartet reminiscent a Beatles album cover, resulted in, “A word of mouth success, which I think is sort of how we have to make art in this time now. It’s not like the cultural institutions are going to support us.”
Leigh Purtill’s Zombie Ballet. (Photo by Leigh Purtill)
This idea for A Post-Apocalyptic Home Companion was also inspired by the pandemic in 2022, when she was going stir crazy and created a show for the small backstage gallery of an Altadena coffee house, seating capacity 49.
A ‘Post-Apocalyptic’ Home Companion! (photo by Madeline Peng Miller)
For A Post-Apocalyptic Home Companion, “Performers will include the Terrible Adult Chamber Orchestra (TACO) performing Offenbach’s ‘Orpheus in the Underworld’; TACO with Leigh Purtill’s Zombie Ballet doing Tchaikovsky’s ‘Waltz of the (Mutant) Flowers’; and Theatre Arts at Caltech (TACIT), who’ll be doing short excerpts from EARTH DATA, a just-opened Broadway-style musical created entirely by Caltech/JPL scientists. In response, artists will participate in a hilarious live lightning-round quiz culled from the best of the The Loh Down on Science, celebrating its 20th year.
Theatre Arts at Caltech (TACIT) performing EARTH DATA / The Musical
“So the themes are like a futuristic community, because whatever happens on a national level going forward — we put our cards on the table declaring as Democrats — we will need to come together locally as a community and just celebrate our survival and think about the future, where art and science come together.”
SANDRA TSING LOH
Sandra Tsing Loh
Odyssey Theatre Ensemble’s Thresholds of Invention
I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Come to It: Saturday, Nov. 16 and 23 at 8 p.m.
A ‘Post-Apocalyptic’ Home Companion!: Sunday, Nov. 17 at 2 p.m.
I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Come to It:
Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd.
for tickets ($25), call (310) 477-2055 ext. 2 or visit Odyssey
Sarah A. Spitz is an award-winning public radio producer, retired from KCRW, where she also produced arts stories for NPR. She writes features and reviews for various print and online publications.
