Review: ‘{my lingerie play},’ a Glitter-Dusted, Song-Filled Call for Liberation

As angry as “{my lingerie play}” is, and it is pretty angry, it’s also a friendly, feel-good celebration of human beings sharing a space where it’s safe for them to be themselves — and safe for Ms. Oh to stand onstage in her lingerie with her skimpily attired, glitter-dusted band (Ryan McCurdy, who is also the music director, on drums; Matt Park on guitar; Rocky Vega on bass).

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Shades of Taylor Mac and the cabaret band the Skivvies for sure. But the voice Ms. Oh is channeling is her own as she talks about gender, race, class and the shame so many people experience about sexual desire. She’d like to banish that feeling, along with the everyday predation and abuse that put women and queer people at risk.

It’s hard material to tackle in a performance intended to entertain, but Ms. Oh mostly manages that. Her stage persona is funny, irreverent and approachable, her band is terrific and her songs cycle lushly through a whole range of moods, from dance-party exuberance to mournful darkness. In this bubble-blowing, confetti-throwing show, the lighting (by Kate McGee) keeps things gorgeous, with a breeze softly riffling the set’s tinsel-curtain backdrop.

“Who wants to make out with me onstage right now?” Ms. Oh inquires well into the performance — and that is not, by a long shot, the most daring thing she asks a spectator to do. (Someone may leave the theater with a freshly shaved head, but it doesn’t have to be you.) The night I saw the show, a woman in front volunteered immediately for kissing, then turned shy.

“I got carried away,” she told Ms. Oh. “My children are in the room.”

But the woman didn’t back out, and what followed was the gentlest possible demonstration of Ms. Oh asking for, and getting, consent, step by step. It was startlingly sweet and sexy, not least because it was so respectful. That’s the sort of thing this show does: puts drab-sounding ideals into action and blindsides you with the resulting loveliness.

Stop right here if you don’t want to know how “{my lingerie play}” ends. It’s the one section of the show with mandatory audience participation, and when Ms. Oh explained what she wanted us to do — move to the edges of the theater and form a circle — it seemed impractical, awkward and off-puttingly kumbaya.

All of which it is, yet the idea that the performers and audience are simply “people in a room together,” as Ms. Oh says, is central to the power of the show. Dutifully, we took our places in the circle, looking across the theater at one another as the band played one last song and the audience joined in on the chorus.

The surprise was how moving the moment turned out to be: strangers standing shoulder to shoulder, raising their voices together to make a glorious sound.

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