Tim Miller returns to NC to assess 'Lay of the Land'

Performer Tim Miller has built his reputation as much on the quality of his work as on the controversy surrounding it. A central figure of the culture wars, California-based Miller was one of the NEA Four, a group of artists who lost their federal funding in the 1990s for so-called obscene content. This incident, as well as his status as a gay male in America and his Australian partner’s difficulties with obtaining citizenship, continue to influence Miller’s intensely personal and political work. Next week, Miller will begin a week-long residency at the North Carolina School of the Arts and will perform Lay of the Land, his most recent work about California’s Proposition 8 and other issues, on Thursday.

How has Lay of the Land changed as the narrative of Prop 8 has unfolded?

There are so many unfolding narratives. It’s non-stop wherever I go. This piece is so topical, and there’s so much going on. Everywhere I’ve done the piece, it’s been enmeshed in something way beyond Prop 8. The first stop on the tour was in Tallahassee, where on the same day Prop 8 passed they passed Amendment 2, which was really right out of the Third Reich. It makes it nearly impossible for gay people to sign a contract in that state—it’s right up there with the Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany, banning all kinds of marriages between Jews and Gentiles. Or Boston—while I was performing there, just over 50 miles away, Maine overturned their marriage equality bill.

It’s just nonstop stuff cooking and happening while I’ve been doing the piece, which was made and premiered during the court case in California. And the piece is really informed by the incredible energy and power of my home state declaring marriage equality a fundamental right only to have it snatched away by 52 percent of the voters. It’s a roller-coaster ride. But it makes it incredibly interesting because it’s not the only thing I’m talking about—there’s the unfolding story of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” which is literally on the front page of the newspaper practically every day, certainly the last 10 days. You have to read the newspapers before you go to the theater.

Given former Senator Jesse Helms’ stance during the NEA Four controversy, what is the particular resonance of performing in North Carolina?

I have a very close relationship with North Carolina. Certainly among states in the Southeast, it’s the state I work in the most. I’ve premiered shows there—it’s such an amazingly interesting and complicated state. Very contradictory political impulses.

The NEA thing, which is so personally linked to my personal narrative, is one of the things Jesse Helms, as he molders in the grave, is best known for, along with racism and killing people—that happy list of things. So it’s always very charged for me. But it’s somewhere I go a lot and work with students, as I will be at NCSA. Almost every year I go and work at Wake Forest.

Part of the reason I have such a long history with North Carolina is that 20 years ago, at the time of the NEA Four stuff, I was very involved in the Southeast with this theater organization called Ultimate Roots. A lot of people in North Carolina just didn’t want their state associated with Jesse Helms, so I think a lot of people just started bringing me to show that I can come and perform there. In a lot of years, it’s the state I perform in the most, even more than California.

It’s stuff I bring up a lot when I do campus visits, partly because I think it’s an interesting connection and a way in for the students who are raised really religiously and feel they can’t talk about that. And there’s the obvious nutty obsession, a certain non-representative bunch who only think about gay sex instead of feeding the poor or infant mortality rates—that seems a little more important. Gently and provocatively nudging the obsession with the tiny, almost nonexistent mention of anything resembling gay people in the Bible, compared to the hundreds and hundreds of mentions that every rich person is going to hell and divorce is a capital crime and menstruating women should be kept in mud huts. It’s this obsession with a couple of things that are interpreted to comment on my husband and my life, which I reject completely.

It’s interesting stuff to weigh in on, and not just in the Southeast. It’s a strong and pointed thing anywhere in the country. It’s a very complex religious and culturally religious country, and it’s good stuff to engage.

How do you deal with the question of audience and yourself as spectacle?

Audiences are quite amazing and feed you. So what I’m really interested in how do we use the people in the room in that particular place, whether it’s Winston or Boone, N.C. or Chicago, Illinois. What’s going on in the world? Who’s here tonight? How do I make something happen here? Whether it’s from the stage or the moments I’m engaging the audience or asking them to form a jury, which I do in this show.

This show is about citizenship, its rights and responsibilities and the way they are surgically denied to gay people in this country to let us know very clearly we are not citizens. Short of voting, we are denied all the basic fundamental rights of citizenship, which are historically marriage and military service.

That’s why those are the things we fight about so much. It’s this kicking and screaming to let queer people see themselves as citizens. Voting is off the table, you can’t really deny people the right to vote—except when we do [laughs]. Anyone who has served in prison pretty much can never vote again. It’s the way Jim Crow laws continue through the drug war—anyway, another subject. With all that, it’s kind of a rich lively space to parachute in to the 30 or 35 states and see what’s going on there.

After NCSA, I’m going into parts of Virginia I’ve never performed in before. I’ve always been in the D.C.-Richmond corridor. To go to Virginia right now where you have an insane attorney general [Bob McDonnell] trying to strip what few rights gay people have in Virginia and to take away the nondiscrimination in hiring at V-Tech and UVA. And that will clearly go right into Lay of the Land in all its meanings.

So that’s the kind of feeling with performance, that the audience is co-creating it with you.

It’s a written piece with sets. It’s not like I make a whole new piece for Virginia Tech, though the Congresswoman from Winston-Salem makes an appearance in this show—Virginia Fox, who is a complete nut of course. [She’s] the one who trashed Matthew Shepard from the floor of the House of Representatives, who said being gay had nothing to do with it and it’s a big gay hoax. So I imagine the kind of action that should be happening in her office.

With the body as the locus of performance, how do you deal with that as the site of physical identity and psychological trauma?

In some ways, it’s required of us. Certainly the queer body—also, the queered body—in America is so messed with and problematized, troubled from the incredible invasion of our homes, our bedrooms, our citizenship and our ability to maintain our households and tax equity. It’s so thoroughly messed with that you have to start developing those skills really early on whether you’re an artist or not. How do we negotiate safety? How do we negotiate when to be out, when to be not? How do we negotiate this most important part of my life—the person I love, which I think anyone would say is the most important thing in life if you’re lucky enough to be with the love of a partner, husband, spouse? To know that’s disrespected and grounds for dismissal from the U.S. military.

Those kind of coping mechanisms and walking that tightrope are something everyone is familiar with, whether you’re an undergrad at Duke or a performance artist doing my show in Winston. It’s in us at a cell level. Our bodies are at risk. If you’re visible in ways that are obviously queer, if it’s a bad night in Durham or Winston-Salem, you’re probably going to have trouble.

This is embodied. I’ve had three relationships, and two of those three men have been almost killed in anti-gay violence. It’s systemic. It’s encouraged by one of the political parties. They call other members of Congress f—s—it’s unbelievable—and don’t seem to get censured for it.

From the top down, that integrated embodied citizenship is troubled in all kinds of ways. Performance is one of those ways you can start to put the pieces together in the way that creativity does. You pull the fractured parts of ourselves forward. Even if it’s false reintegration—or maybe temporary is the better word—for the period of the performance at least, I’ve integrated performer in relation to community, the audience that’s there, the energy that gets raised. Performance is a really charged place because it is embodied, not just the performer’s body, but everyone is physically there in a time when we’re increasingly not there.

Sitting in a cafe with our best friend texting people we’ve never met who are Facebook friends is such a strange contradiction—not being where we are. Performance is one of those great places where if you’re suddenly texting or on your cell phone, you may well actually be yelled at. It’s a place that privileges real time and embodied presence. It seems like a really good place to address some of that wounded space that’s certainly around our queer citizens’ bodies.

Tim Miller will peform Lay of the Land April 8 at the Agnes de Mille at the North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem.