Tim Miller performs his latest solo piece, "Lay of the Land." Photo provided
REVIEW: Tim Miller at The Kitchen Theater, April 1-3
Last minute publicity that Tim Miller’s recent visit to the Kitchen Theatre would “contain no nudity” provoked quite a few quips, as well as a bit of confusion. One friend asked me if censorship was involved.
No censorship, not this time. Miller gained national prominence as one of the NEA 4, performance artists whose funding was revoked by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1990 when Sen. Jesse Helms made them the scapegoats for an anti-radical art, anti-sex, anti-queer campaign. Long infamous for doffing his clothes at some point in his performances, local publicity for Miller’s latest piece, Lay of the Land, carried the requisite parental warning.
Not that Miller grows more decorous with middle age. His work remains ferociously focused on the intersection of politics with the body; in this case, the passage of California’s Proposition 8, which stripped queers of the right to marry, a right granted to them just months earlier by the California Supreme Court. In an especially delicious passage, Miller recounts the prepubescent but totally gay Tim’s successful attempts to disprove the saying “put it where the sun don’t shine.” Finding a strip of sunshine tucked in the alley next to his house, he sprawls on his back, flips his legs over his head, spreads open his cheeks, and quite clearly feels the warmth pouring into his ass. In the midst of this story, Miller observes that he’ll grow quite used to this position in later years.
We laugh, knowingly, but we also find our minds caught, snagged for a moment on the odd juxtapositions. An angry epithet tossed by a passing motorist on an anti-Prop 8 march (“put it where…”) morphs into a formative erotic memory, which in turn rips open not only the phrase’s homophobic intent, but also its illogicality. Such moments become touchstones in a Miller piece: later he imagines his entire body filling with this joyous light that enters his asshole.
Such is the supreme artlessness of Tim Miller’s art. His stories unwind in an engaged, yet offhand, manner, an innocuous twinkle bouncing through his baby blues. Seeming digressions become thematic strands. A glint of sunshine off some metal object flashbacks to a young Tim watching his father George approach his throat with a butcher knife. Tim is choking on a piece of gristle, and dad is ready to perform an emergency tracheotomy. Video projections of Abraham and Isaac, the iconic knife poised for the sacrifice, flood the back wall. Miller reimagines the memory as the myth of the patriarchal U.S. father ready to sacrifice the quivering flesh of his queer son. (A fearless queen, Tim embraces the occasional purple prose.) Later, Tim imagines popping the homophobic gristle out of middle America’s throat.
The only props on stage are the US and California State flags strung up on a line. These flags, which graced every elementary schoolroom of his childhood, are emblematic of the heart of Lay of the Land: the place of the citizen. Miller confesses an almost gooey streak of patriotism, of love for his land in constant battle with the hate the state shows for his sexuality (whether it be Calfornia, the US, or the abstract state). Facing a jury summons, Miller wonders what the audience-jury would decide if he were to ask them to vote whether he should burn these flags.
As soon as he floats this iconic image of protest, he admits he cannot do it. Certainly not the California flag, with its friendly grizzly bear. He has a thing for bears. Just as we decide he means furry, older gay men, it turns out he has fantasies of animals. Now he begins a hilarious new-age ritual of calling on animal spirits, except these are the mascots of the many colleges he plays at. The Minnesota Gopher is one of the more powerful of the spirits that aids him in his travels.
The Calfornia flag leads to the exhumation of “how the west was won” (grandly cinematic), with sharp passionate indictments of a history of injustice. In the evening’s most thrilling moment, as Miller wields this righteous, powerful sword of anger in what appears to be the show’s climax, a sea change occurs. Suddenly, booked for another flight to another city on his tour, Miller finds himself flying on his own power high above the land, his animal spirits at hand, as he climbs into a rhapsodic vision of what might be, a more utopian inclusive America, which he surveys from a perch on the crown of Lady Liberty herself. This Whitmanesque calling of the whole land into Tim’s own highly eroticized body is the pièce de résistance, a mobilizing call to perseverance and hope, which mashes together savvy, tongue-in-cheek agitprop with a transcendent sense of queer citizenship.
Irony, be it cynical or twiggish, has been à la mode for political art at least since Reagan. Tim Miller dares to give sincerity co-equal status, even at the risk of being dismissed as naïve. Yet it in the end it is Tim’s ten-year old self, with his hyper-acute sensitivity, who sees to the heart of the matter, and proves again and again that the sun will shine, brightly and warmly, in the queerest of openings.