PERFORMANCE ART REVIEW : Miller’s Life Behind the ‘Stretch Marks’

Tim Miller is, of course, an egotist. It goes with the territory in performance art. In fact, it goes with the territory in art.

The traditional artist, however, uses a mask to take the curse off his self-involvement. The hero of “This Side of Paradise” isn’t F. Scott Fitzgerald, it’s “Amory Blaine.” “I know myself,” says Amory at the age of 30, “but that is all.”

Miller, who turned 30 last year, gives us Tim Miller straight up. His pieces constitute an ongoing autobiography, the latest chapter of which opened over the weekend at Highways in Santa Monica.

“Stretch Marks” is the title, by which Miller means those little folds that one starts to notice after 30, not to mention the first few gray hairs. The golden boy is starting to feel flawed.

The title also suggests the birth process, which our hero feels continually in the middle of, like a baby hurtling down the canal. Some of the best sequences in the piece suggest a man on a talking jag--if he says the words fast enough, maybe he’ll be able to discern the meaning of the experience.

The tempo also suggests the rush of a passing train, one of the evening’s recurrent images. Planes are another obsession. Miller straps a paper 747 to his arms and becomes a Daedalus (Stephen Daedalus?) who is panicked to fly.

“Death in Venice” is another source of imagery. Miller’s bathing suit suggests Tadzio on the strand, but he is beginning to feel like Aschenbach, what with all the death around these days.

Between arias, Miller simply converses, at normal speed and pitch. He is a good story teller. Sometimes a serious silence falls on the room, the highest tribute an actor can get. At other times--the airline routine--we’re more lightly held.

Miller also is a dancer, or at least a movement-person. He stretches on a vertical beach, achieves an epiphany of sorts with an unattached toilet seat and shinnies up a rope to perch on the steel girder over the stage.

At no point does he suggest a wild man. As he keeps reminding us (another leitmotif), this is a nice boy from Whittier. His provenance and his temperament create something of a problem for Miller as an artist. He is submitting his life to us as a “found object.” And no one would deny that he has had interesting experiences, that he has made important breakthroughs--here, the decision to really make some noise about the lousy treatment that the county gives its AIDS patients.

However, Miller doesn’t have the skill of a born eccentric--Spalding Gray, say--to turn every moment in his life into an adventure. For example, he tells a long story about the summer he studied German with a woman who was actually, wow, a Latina. Somehow we aren’t as blown away by the paradox as Miller is.

Later, Miller recalls swapping stories with two people in a railroad dining car. Theirs are from real life, and Miller tells them beautifully. His is a fantasy, and it’s a comedown.

Not, of course, from his point of view. Like Whitman, he celebrates himself, and we can enjoy the ardor with which he does it. The Pacific Ocean, he tells us, isn’t just any ocean--it’s the ocean beside which he first kissed another boy. There is the slight suggestion that a plaque on the site would not be amiss.

After 30, this sort of narcissism gets problematic. There are signs in “Stretch Marks” that Miller is starting to kid it. At other moments, he seems determined to hang onto it, as if it were the thing that made him unique. Time will tell.

Plays Fridays-Sundays at 8:30 p.m. Closes Aug. 27. 1651 18th St., Santa Monica. (213) 453-1755.