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Reviewed by:
  • Lay of the Land
  • Darren Patrick Blaney
Lay of the Land. By Tim Miller. Performance Space 122, New York City. 8 December 2011.

With Lay of the Land, Tim Miller attempted to straddle the antinomy between the mainstream LGBT “marriage-equality” movement and more radical queer objections to it. That his solo show seemingly championed the “assimilationist” politics eschewed by some, while simultaneously reveling in many hallmark aspects of queerness (for example, polymorphous eroticism, suspension of linear temporality, and celebration of sexual communities, among others) testified to Miller’s mastery of the theatrical form he has pioneered for over three decades. His ability to audaciously recall 1980s orgies at Performance Space (PS) 122 and brag about recent airport sexploits while also decrying his lack of equal marriage rights evidenced both his personal stakes in the issue and his authenticity as a queer subject. Significantly, Miller’s performance also provoked questions about whether radical queer [End Page 598]


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Tim Miller in Lay of the Land. (Photo: Leo Garcia.)

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performance practices remain effective tools for a mainstream political agenda.

In his 1978 book Queer Theatre, Stefan Brecht characterized the genre as rebelliously angry and exuberantly erotic and as exposing the perversity of normative morality through defiantly joyous displays of playful lasciviousness and personal freedom. Lay of the Land skillfully married these elements. For example, recalling a homophobic slur aimed at friends during a Prop-8 protest in Los Angeles (“Stick it where the sun don’t shine”), Miller recollected his childhood bewilderment with the phrase. He gleefully recounted that as a child yoga prodigy, he often opened his anus to the light of noon in his backyard, “[d]iscovering a whole new kind of salutation to the sun.” “Can the sun really not shine up your asshole?” he metatheatrically wondered. “You should never ask a solo performer that . . . we know it shines out of our assholes for sure.” By returning to the corporeal concerns of earlier works like My Queer Body and Fruit Cocktail, Miller lightheartedly demonstrated how, when confronted with homo-phobic violence and laws undermining civil rights, queer performance practices remain useful tools to combat a homophobic culture prone to rhetorically shaming the queer body.

Lay of the Land followed Miller’s previous work technically as well as thematically, drawing on characteristic formulae described in his 1995 essay “Preaching to the Converted.” For example, he broke the fourth wall by interpolating the audience as a jury, while deliberating about burning the US and California state flags. The set and costume designs were minimal, rendering the piece easily portable to the numerous college venues and local theatres in both red and blue states where he tours. Miller’s entrance and seemingly mundane first lighting choice symbolically codified him as one among the crowd. Casually emerging from the back of the house carrying a flashlight and searching for his Blackberry, he drolly prattled to the audience about his absentmindedness: he has lost not only phones, but keys, passports, cherries, and oh yes, his civil rights on election day. Miller’s waggish entrance by flashlight queered both space and time: lit by a hand-held phallic tool, the theatre became a clubhouse. Within this space, Miller described randy adolescent camper sleepovers; his boy scout erection of the US flag with a two-finger salute; and a childhood choking incident prompted by a disagreement with his father after refusing to attend a Dodgers ballgame. Miller likened this latter event to the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, as his dad considered giving him a tracheotomy. His virtuosity within this performance context thus transformed a “high culture” theatre space into a vehicle for promoting community storytelling. By using his experience to represent the collective, Miller’s performance encouraged dialogue after his exit, suggesting the piece’s efficacy as a social catalyst.

This metaphorical image of the choking queer recurred as Miller enacted the frustration, paranoia, and rage that arise when one’s love and civil liberties feel constantly on public trial. During these sections, seen through shadowy lighting denoting prison bars, Miller’s delivery transitioned repeatedly from a frothing-at-the-mouth jeremiad...

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