Coming Up: 1 ‘Fruit Cocktail’

As part of a monologue called “Fruit Cocktail,” performance artist Tim Miller talks about various aspects of his coming of age in Orange County, including the enormous impact Handel’s “Messiah” had on his life.

“It’s all true, first of all,” he said during a recent phone interview. “My first boyfriend was studying music and conducting at Cal State Fullerton and kind of wooed me to the music of Handel. . . . ‘Fruit Cocktail’ is a funny, sexy journey through 48 hours in 1976 in which I fell in love, came out, turned 18 and, to the ‘Messiah,’ had sex for the first time.”

Miller will perform “Fruit Cocktail”--in Orange County for the first time--Saturday at the Huntington Beach Art Center, and he will be the first to tell you that he plays the title role.

“There’s nudity, being covered in orange juice, the human peeling, the orange peeling--you know, the basics,” he said, noting that the work even includes an imagined trip across the time-space continuum on a swallowed Valencia orange seed. “The show is built on a fruit metaphor, the orange metaphor, with the orange as a symbol for birth and juice that’s going to feed us in our lives.”

Now artistic director and California Arts Council artist-in-residence at Highways in Santa Monica, Miller, 37, grew up in Whittier and attended public school in Orange County, where he says a show about the wonderful qualities of fruit is especially appropriate.

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He had training at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa before moving in 1978 to New York, where he stayed for nine years. He now lives in Venice Beach and currently tours “Fruit Cocktail” and two other performance works, “My Queer Body” (1992) and “Naked Breath” (1994), playing about 30 cities a year. Venues have included the Yale Repertory Theatre, the Copenhagen International Theater Festival and the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival.

“This show is my version of ‘Main Street USA,’ only it’s about a young gay man lucky enough to find another gay man who shared his sexuality and fired him up to be a performer,” Miller said. “In some ways the story is very conventional, yet it’s not one that we tend to hear. That coming-of-age story tends to be reserved for heterosexual boys and girls.”

The homosexual coming-of-age, of course, often involves a coming out. Miller’s was unusual:

“The joke in the show is that my parents don’t react. They say, ‘OK, go put out the garbage.’ As I left . . . I had to ask myself, like Peggy Lee, is that all there is?”

But the impact was greater than he at first imagined.

“I came out before the religious right discovered encouragement of bigotry toward gay people as a primary method of fund-raising. That’s one of their only methods right now, but it’s a rapidly losing proposition.

“The hatred spewed at gay people and people of color at the [Republican] convention in Houston four years ago . . . turned my mom from a lifelong Republican to a Democrat. My family drew the line. But even the Republican Party is dealing with it now, distancing themselves from that ugly stuff. It just doesn’t play.”

Miller gained notoriety as one of the “NEA Four” artists denied National Endowment for the Arts grants in 1990 for “indecency” because of pressure from such politicians including Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.). The four sued the agency and ultimately won reinstatements of their grants plus punitive damages.

Miller has taught at Yale University and, since 1991, at UCLA’s Graduate Theater Program. He collaborates on “performance art sermons” with Episcopal priest Malcolm Boyd at St. Augustine-by-the-Sea in Santa Monica and is an adjunct professor in religion and theater at the Claremont School of Theology.

“Strangely, with all the attacks on me from the religious right and Jesse Helms, I’ve been enmeshed in really trying to understand my work in relation to the shared source of religion and theater,” Miller said. “This is a big, big discussion right now; it’s a huge wounded place in our culture.

“I teach future ministers to find ways to locate the sacred and take it into their storytelling and sermon-making. It’s unlikely in some ways to have a performance artist who’s been banned doing sermons at churches, but I’m happy to bridge some of that distance.”

At the suggestion that he may be obsessed with sex, Miller reiterates that, beneath its homosexual exterior, “Fruit Cocktail” is a fairly conventional show.

“What drives most heterosexual plot lines is romance and sexuality and divorce,” he explained. “It’s part of being human. Gay people have just as much variety of opinion as to how they arrange their sexuality. There are sexual libertarians who want to break down some of this cultural training, and others who are absolutely monogamous--lesbians who are adopting, who are more like my parents than my parents were.

“Performance art in general [focuses on] sexuality, on our bodies as an embattled place,” he said. “We’re under attack by a culture that is afraid of the body, freaked out. Sexuality, fat, death--Americans are pretty messed up, more messed up than the English, which is pretty bad. Even English women can show their breasts at the beach.

“There is a trauma about the body that is peculiar to the American culture, [a culture that] at the same time is obsessed with the body. Using men’s and women’s bodies to sell cigarettes, and literally everything else--that’s a weird pressure. My commitment is to explore the body and sexuality.

“It’s a wounded place. Just like religion.”

* Performance artist Tim Miller presents “Fruit Cocktail,” an evening-length solo piece about coming out in Orange County, Saturday at the Huntington Beach Art Center, 538 Main St. 8 p.m. $8 to $10. (714) 374-1560.