Miller Struggles With ‘My Queer Body’

More people now know Tim Miller for his struggles with the National Endowment for the Arts and his activism in the push for AIDS research funding than for his performances. At this point, Miller’s most interesting struggle is with himself, and the struggle is all over his new work at Highways, “My Queer Body.”

The title itself encompasses Miller’s public persona as the champion of both “queerness”--best exemplified by Queer Nation, the Earth First! of the gay movement--and the artist’s right to explore the physical self. The latter can offer Miller a rich universal performance language. Ironically, the former is hemming him in more and more. Seldom has an artist preached to the choir the way Miller is doing with his Highways fans. Rather than liberating himself to a larger public, Miller is seriously ghettoizing his message.

Like his best autobiographical pieces of the past (especially the funny/tragic “Some Golden States”), “My Queer Body” is interwoven with narrative memoirs of his gay teenhood and a charming sense of humor. Either in his rising verbal torrents or disarming asides, Miller reveals a stand-up comic’s sense of self-deprecation.

At the same time, the whole show is programmed to key in on Miller’s body. It’s a narcissism that would be an elixir if only Miller took himself less seriously: When he sits nude on the lap of an audience member who then rubs his solar plexus, what might have been outrageously funny comes off as New Age touchy-feely. What’s really felt is the scattershot approach here, a smorgasbord of lugubrious fables, naked political preachments and wisecracks, some fresh, some stale.

But none of it truly challenging. Miller has shorn movement almost entirely from his work, but he is not yet a strong enough writer to fill the vacuum. His verbal pattern--slow and quiet, rising to fast and frantic, and back down again--becomes predictable, especially when the kind of complex theatrical staging that used to be in his work is now missing. Outside events have radicalized Miller but, in the ultimate of ironies, he has turned artistically conservative.

“My Queer Body,” Highways, 1651 18th St., Santa Monica, Fridays-Saturdays, 8:30 p.m. Ends April 4. $10; (213) 453-1755. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

‘Name of the People’ Links Killer, Victims

Because of the impending California execution of murderer Robert Alton Harris, the death penalty issue hovers like a cloud over Tim Boland’s play about a man on Death Row, “In the Name of the People,” at the Road Theatre Company. Though Boland’s intricate plot involves all sorts of 11th-hour machinations to stay the execution of J.P. (a mannered Gino Cabanas), the play is really about how a murderer/rapist and his victims are fatefully linked.

The trap is that Boland was inspired by a true story, yet true stories sometimes make for untrue drama. The this-would-never-happen syndrome hampers “In the Name of the People” when it should be explosive.

J.P.’s rape and murder of Mr. and Mrs. Murphy’s daughter (Glenn Gilbert and Joan Foley waver as spouses on the ropes) has brought him to death’s door, but he’s still trying to make deals. The gruff, hardened J.P. pleads with the malleable Mr. Murphy to take custody of his only daughter, Cheryl (a strong Danielle Katz), perhaps as a way of evening life’s ledger. It also means tearing Cheryl away from J.P.’s dying mother (a wrenching Catherine Paolone), while convincing the intransigent Mrs. Murphy to take in the offspring of the man who killed her child.

It’s a paradoxical scenario: Completely impossible under the circumstances, but stuffed with scenes of operatic passion under Taylor Gilbert’s direction. Dean Howell’s giant set in the Road’s warehouse space captures the metallic feel of a Death Row cell, but an upstairs space for the Murphys’ scenes disconnects us from the family drama. Still, Boland has a humanist’s fairness, giving every point of view a full hearing, refusing any easy answers.

“In the Name of the People,” Road Theatre Company, 10741 Sherman Way, North Hollywood, Thursdays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends April 11. $10-$12.50; (818) 503-7792. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.

‘Eastern Standard’ Already Feels Dated

Is it possible that a late ‘80s play is already sounding a touch dated? Richard Greenberg’s tragicomedy of the Reagan boom-boom years, “Eastern Standard,” isn’t about a time zone; it’s about a time on which the country has soured. The fate of Greenberg’s yupsters--with the exception of a TV executive dying of AIDS--feels slightly antique.

Director Bud Beyer’s Theatre 40 production, then, is sometimes amazing in the way it injects Greenberg’s knowing, Upper East Side banter with palpable depth of feeling. Christopher Michael Moore captures his architect Stephen’s cloddish goodness that so attracts Carlyle King’s troubled, duplicitous Phoebe. J. David Krassner suggests that his snide gay artist Drew really doesn’t like himself, and that maybe with Phoebe’s brother, Peter (Webster Williams, who looks as if he just walked out of the Plaza), he can find true love.

Greenberg is not only more interested in these people than his two characters on the social margins--would-be actress Ellen (the shimmering Christina Carlisi) and her newfound homeless friend May (the effectively coarse Gloria Stroock)--but he concocts a phony happy ending for the well-off that undermines what was becoming an ironic melo-comedy. The poor, in the play and the country, provide an issue, then are disposed of. Beyer’s company, though, makes rich and poor alike very human.

“Eastern Standard,” Theatre 40, 241 Moreno Drive, Beverly Hills High School, Mondays-Wednesdays, 8 p.m. Ends Wednesday. $10; (213) 466-1767. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.