PERFORMANCE ART REVIEW : Tim Miller, Malcolm Boyd in ‘Running?’ at Highways

On Palm Sunday, while both “Parsifal” and Passover music made their way over the airwaves, performance art was being preached at Highways--courtesy of Tim Miller and his ad-hoc collaborator, the Rev. Malcolm Boyd.

Not only were they a topical twosome, presenting ritualized excerpts from the 66-year-old Episcopal priest’s prayer book, “Are You Running With Me, Jesus?” but a compatible one at that.

Moreover, it was just a matter of time before the idea that theater and church derive from a common source would hit. The human condition, as these eloquent spokesmen pointed out, is ultimately bewildering. The outcries made on its behalf inspire both art and religion.

In Miller’s creative realm--one that combines script, dance motif and veristic detail--little else could be so ripe as the Jesus theme. For the concept of God as salvation surely rings on deaf ears, he says, given the universal miseries of life.

Indeed, Miller sees the Crucifixion as a metaphor. Midway through the hourlong event, he asks: “Why don’t all the Jesuses get fed up, jump off their crosses, pack their bags and go to Miami?”

He opts, of course, comically to anthropomorphize the Christian son of God, to bring Him into the present, to make Him one of us and thus get some accountability for such horrors as the Holocaust, war and AIDS.

Both Boyd and Miller want to know “why people crucify each other” and seek “to understand the existence of suffering, torture, violence, pain and loss.” Throughout, they punctuate their relatively quiescent anguishings with choreography: aerobic semaphores and circular locomotions.

Miller habitually impersonates Jesus the carpenter in dance gestures, moving a plane back and forth, nailing together the pieces of wood that become his crucifix. With each hammer blow he hollers common invectives of prejudice.

But the most original ideas were literary: for instance, his likening Jesus to a cross (pun unintended) between Alyosha Karamazov and Zooey Glass. The most moving contribution from Boyd came in his teary “confession” to the audience: “Jesus had a body, too, and experienced things. Yet he consented to his death. So can I.”