Barred from Villanova, gay artist Tim Miller is welcomed elsewhere

Tim Miller just wants to teach.

Well, that's not entirely true. He wants to act and perform and raise Cain too.

And tell stories and entertain and create that almost indefinable flash, that tantalizing moment when an audience says, "Yes, we get it!"

So it all boils down to teaching.

That's why he was so deeply offended when Villanova University, which had invited him to conduct a weeklong workshop with enthusiastic theater students, a few weeks ago abruptly disinvited him and canceled his workshop.

"It's so embarrassing, crazy, and cowardly," Miller said recently from his home in the Venice section of Los Angeles.

But Villanova is not the only venue around, nor is it the only teaching environment. Miller will be in Philadelphia next week performing his most recent piece, Lay of the Land, at InterAct Theatre, 2030 Sansom St. (April 12 to 15), as part of InterAct's four-week festival exploring identity, "Outside the Frame: Voices From the Other America."

He will also conduct a workshop there, this one open to the public, from Monday through April 15, culminating in an ensemble performance by workshop participants on InterAct's main stage April 15.

And, thanks to Bryn Mawr and Muhlenberg Colleges, Villanova's students will still get an opportunity to work with the 53-year-old Miller, a renowned gay activist and performance artist and a veteran of the so-called culture wars of the late 1980s and 1990s. The two colleges stepped in where Villanova, a Catholic institution, ultimately feared to tread.

"We had concerns that his performances were not in keeping with our Catholic and Augustinian values and mission," Villanova said in a statement justifying its classroom ban of a performer so indebted to the Catholic saint that he used an Augustinian epigraph for his last book: "In the immense court of my memory ... I come to meet myself."

It still riles.

"What shocked me is that would ban me from teaching," said Miller. "What it says is that they don't trust their own students enough to let them work with me. ... I've performed at universities and colleges all over the country - about 500, actually. Villanova is the only one to act so shamefully."

The irony, of course, is that Miller was not going to take the stage at Villanova at all. His workshops are designed to help students realize their own individual works, assist them in bringing out their own voices and stories, whatever they might be. He would ask them to consider "a day in your life when you told the truth."

"It wouldn't be my truth, it would be their truth," he said.

Bryn Mawr's Sharon Ullman, a professor of history and coordinator of the college's gender and sexuality program, said she saw this as an opportunity, saying that Miller's work "incorporates such warmth and wit" and that she was "confident our students, no matter what histories they wish to explore in their performances, are going to have a wonderful time in this workshop."

But where Bryn Mawr sees warmth and wit, Villanova's president, the Rev. Peter Donohue, former director of the school's theater department, sees something "disturbing" -"it is the explicit, graphic, and sexual content of his performances that led to this decision," he said.

This means, said Miller, that Villanova has opted to "silence their students and force them off campus."

Coercion, and resistance to it, infuses Lay of the Land, a piece inspired by Miller's anger over the 2008 passage in California of Proposition 8, a sweeping ban on same-sex marriage. At the heart of the piece is the image of Abraham, knife in hand, fully prepared to sacrifice his son, Isaac.

This image, in Miller's dreamy, funny, and engagingly optimistic performance, melds with a childhood memory of having dinner with his father in their Whittier, Calif., bungalow - Nixon country.

Young Tim chokes on a piece of meat. His father grabs a knife, apparently prepared to perform a dinner-table tracheotomy, to cut out his son's incomprehensible gayness along with the hunk of gristly steak.

It doesn't end that way. The child at last coughs up the meat:

"A gay boy began to breathe in a Formica covered kitchen

"My dad lowers his knife

"He kept lowering his knife

"He welcomed me as a gay kid. I invited my first boyfriend when I was 17 to Thanksgiving. He knew who I was until he died when I was 25

"I want our country to lower the knife. ...

"I want the choking to stop."

It amazes Miller that the battle is still going on deep into the 21st century.

"If anyone told me 18 years ago that you would not have rights by this point, I would have said, 'You're insane.' " he said.

During the culture wars of the late 20th century, Miller and three other performers were denied grants by the National Endowment for the Arts, despite the recommendation of an artist peer panel. These "so-called artists," as Sen. Jesse Helms (R., N.C.) liked to call them, were seen as indecent.

Miller and the other artists went to court, and eventually the endowment settled the case and agreed to give the artists a sum equaling their derailed grants, plus legal expenses. But the case continued to the Supreme Court, which in 1998 affirmed the endowment's authority to impose content restrictions on its grantees.

One court giveth, another court taketh away - that is the paradoxical America thatM iller evokes.

"I'm really conscious of that tightrope," he said, "the forward and backward."

One college bans, another welcomes. North Carolina gave a voice and power to Helms, scourge of federal arts funding and master of antigay rhetoric; now North Carolina provides more performance venues for Miller annually than any other state.

Despite the oscillating advances, Miller has a very real fear that change will not come rapidly enough for him and his partner, the novelist Alistair McCartney. An Australian citizen who cannot obtain citizenship by virtue of marriage to an American, McCartney may well be forced out of the country by immigration authorities.

"My gut feeling is that I will not be able to live out my life in this country because of these crazies," said Miller. "It's humiliating."

Contact Stephan Salisbury at 215-854-5594 or e-mail at ssalisbury@phillynews.com, or follow on Twitter @SPSalisbury.

Performance Art?Lay of the Land?8 p.m. April 12-14, 7 p.m. April 15 at InterAct Theatre at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St. Tickets: $25. Information: 215-568-8079, http://interacttheatre.org