Diana Oh, a glitter-dusted experimental artist-activist whose theater works intertwined political provocation with profound compassion in rituals of communion with audiences, died on June 17 at their home in Brooklyn. Mx. Oh, who used the pronouns they and them, was 38.
The death was confirmed by Mx. Oh’s brother Han Bin Oh, who said the cause was suicide.
A playwright, actor, singer-songwriter and musician, Mx. Oh created art that didn’t fit neatly into categories. Mx. Oh was best known for the outraged yet disarmingly gentle Off Broadway show “{my lingerie play},” a music-filled protest against male sexual violence; it was performed in a series of 10 installations around New York City.
A concert-like play — with Mx. Oh singing at its center — “{my lingerie play}” percolated with an angry awareness of the ways restrictive gender norms and society’s policing of sexual desire can leave whole groups vulnerable. It was an emphatic and loving assertion of the right to be oneself without worrying about abuse.
“I was born a woman, to immigrant parents,” Mx. Oh said in the show. “That’s when my body became political. That’s when I became an artist.”
Mx. Oh’s Infinite Love Party, which the Bushwick Starr theater in Brooklyn produced in 2019, was not a show but rather a structured celebration with a sleepover option. It was a handmade experience, including music and aerial silks, designed to welcome queer people, people of color and their allies.
“It was that soft space that Diana needed that they created for others,” the actor Shawn Randall said in an interview. In 2020, he had chosen Mx. Oh to be his playwriting mentor in the Cherry Lane Theater’s Mentor Project.
When “{my lingerie play}” ran at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in Greenwich Village in 2017, with Mx. Oh and a band performing in their underwear, Mx. Oh installed a “shimmer station” in the lobby and stocked it with body glitter; bubble-blowing equipment was placed under the seats, for spectators to use on cue.
In the script, Mx. Oh described the show as “an effort to provide a safer, more courageous world.” Feeling good — glamming up, being playful — was meant to be part of that.
Charismatic and funny, Mx. Oh was skilled at gaining a crowd’s trust and cooperation. During each performance of the monthlong run, when Mx. Oh would ask for a volunteer from the audience for an onstage head-shaving, “inevitably somebody would raise their hand,” Daniella Topol, who was Rattlestick’s artistic director at the time, said in an interview. Transformation, physical or otherwise, was the point.
Blending life and art was fundamental to Mx. Oh, said the director and dramaturg Mei Ann Teo, a frequent collaborator, close friend and former roommate.
“There’s no separation,” Mx. Teo said. “Their life was their work was their art was their life was their work was their art.”
Diana Oh was born Yea Bin Oh — the original given name meaning “artistic light” in Korean, Mx. Oh’s family said — on Sept. 29, 1986, in Los Angeles, the third and youngest child of Myung Youl Oh, who went by Mark after emigrating to the United States in 1979, and Joo Bong Park Oh, who goes by June. Both parents had worked as professors in South Korea.
Even as a child, Diana had an affinity for music-making and sparkles, and a sense of righteousness. “You’d constantly find her wearing a tiara or something festive,” Han Bin Oh said.
Their brother Soobin Oh recalled a game he’d play with Diana called “bad guy, good guy.” The two siblings were the good guys, talking about “all the ways that we were going to fix the world,” he said.
Financially insecure, the family moved frequently. But the Ohs made sure their children went to school in Beverly Hills, which they believed would provide the best education.
At Beverly Hills High School, Han Bin Oh said, Diana “embedded herself in the drama department.” Mx. Oh studied theater at Smith College on a scholarship, graduating in 2008, and then earned an M.F.A. in 2010 from the Graduate Musical Theater Writing Program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Mx. Oh’s acting credits included playing Dandy Minion, a character charged with encouraging audience participation in Taylor Mac’s extravaganza “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” staged at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn in 2016. Mx. Oh spent the 2018-19 season doing an artist residency at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. Among other works, Mx. Oh also wrote the play “My H8 Letter to the Gr8 American Theatre,” developed in the Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group.
With Mr. Randall, Mx. Oh was a member of the rock band the US Open; its lineup, all actor-alumni of Ensemble Studio Theater, includes, on drums, William Jackson Harper, who starred on the NBC comedy series “The Good Places.”
The last time the group played together, in March, at one of the meditation-infused dance parties that Mx. Oh called “Art Chxrch,” the band posed for a photo around Mx. Oh’s omnipresent dog, Shovels.
Mx. Oh had recently been composing the score for “The Science Fair Project,” a musical collaboration with the playwright Lloyd Suh. In the days before Mx. Oh’s death, the Ma-Yi Theater Company in Manhattan, which commissioned the piece, had planned a studio session to listen to the music.
In addition to Han Bin and Soobin Oh, Mx. Oh is survived by their mother.
Mx. Oh had struggled with mental illness in recent years and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The musician Matt Park, who first met Mx. Oh a decade ago through the Ma-Yi Theater Company, said in an interview: “They were trying to get better, but it was very hard for them in the end.”
Mariah Lebwohl, a member of Mx. Oh’s extended family who was their health care proxy, said Mx. Oh had been terrified of inpatient treatment since going through an involuntary hospitalization after a previous, unsuccessful suicide attempt. In the weeks before their death, Mx. Oh had been seeking intensive outpatient treatment.
“All Diana would talk about is, ‘My brain doesn’t work. I need some help getting it back online,’” Ms. Lebwohl said.
Mx. Oh “wanted to turn this period of their life into art,” she added, and had considered doing so in a show planned for Friday at Here Arts Center in Manhattan.
Instead, on Saturday, there are plans for a vigil and procession from Here Arts Center to the Christopher Street Pier — a place, as Mx. Teo noted, with a “long, glorious queer history” that was also the site of Mx. Oh’s final “{my lingerie play}” installation. Colorful attire and sparkles are requested.
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.
The post Diana Oh, Passionate Voice for Queer Liberation in Theater, Dies at 38 appeared first on New York Times.
