DIANA OH, who passed on this date, (b: 9/29/1986), also known as Zaza, was an American playwright, actor, singer-songwriter and musician who was known for the off-Broadway show titled My Lingerie Play.
Oh was born Yea Bin Oh on September 29, 1986, in Los Angeles, California, to professors who had emigrated to the U.S. from South Korea in the 1970s. They attended Beverly Hills High School before earning a degree in theater at Smith College in 2008 and an MFA from the Graduate Musical Theater Writing Program at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts in 2010
After graduating college, Oh was cast to play Marisol in the 2013 off-off-Broadway comedy play Frankenstein Upstairs and assorted characters in the 2015 American premiere of Lucy Kirkwood’s Chimerica at the Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C.
In 2016, they had a role in the film How to Be Single, and in the threatre, they played a Dandy Minion in the premiere of A 24-Decade History of Popular Music and Number Four, a comfort woman, in Hansol Jung’s Among the Dead.
From 2014 to 2017, Oh staged My Lingerie Play (stylized as {my lingerie play}), a series of 10 art/performance installations at public areas and small theatres in New York and Washington D.C., as well as on the internet. In the initial eight performances, Oh stood on a soapbox wearing just their underwear, a black hat, and sunglasses, holding two brown paper bags on which they had written about slut-shaming, street harassment, and violence against women. Some performances involved additional people, and Oh invited spectator participation at the installations. These concluded in October 2017 with a concert performance, titled {my lingerie play} 2017: Installation #9: THE CONCERT AND CALL TO ARMS!!!!!!!!!, the final installation, at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in New York, with final outdoor performance (Installation 10/10 (The FINAL Final Installation)) scheduled afterwards at Washington Square Park.
The concert performance was just under two hours long and featured music performed by Oh and their band; The New York Times descried the show as “more of an indie band concert” than a traditional play. The show began with Oh in a bathrobe on a soapbox with paper bags inviting the audience to write messages on their own bags. Audience members were given bubble wands to blow during the performance and invited to dress up with body glitter, temporary tattoos, jewelry and other cosmetics at a “shimmer station”. As the show went on, Oh undressed to reveal their “mostly shoplifted” underwear and discussed their life. human sexuality and sexual harassment, gender, race, and racism, transphobia, and current events including the Pulse nightclub shooting and the 2016 United States presidential election. A central theme being liberation, Oh also went topless, held what the Time Out New York magazine termed a “funny and genuinely erotic” discussion about consent with an audience member they made out with, and invited other audience members to have their heads shaved on stage. The show ended with audience members standing around the edge of the theatre, holding the brown paper bags they themselves had written on earlier.
Oh described themself as genderfluid in 2016 and went by they/them pronouns at the time of their death. They also identified as a witch. Oh was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. They died by suicide at their home in Brooklyn, New York City, on June 17, 2025, at age 38.