seeing white: part 1

The other night, after I finished my last paper for the semester, Sarah and I drove to New Orleans to pick up my sister, Shira. We then met up with Andy, had some extra salty and cheesy Mexican food, and went to go see Milk, the new Gus Van Sant movie about Harvey Milk.
The first time I heard about Harvey Milk was during my sophomore year of college. I was taking a solo-performance class and was performing an interpretation of Tim Miller’s “Spilt Milk.” Miller’s piece accentuated what it means to have your hopes shattered in a major way for the first time. I read it as a parallel story to my own, and as such, the death of Harvey Milk was not that interesting to me at the time. For me, the death of Harvey Milk in Miller’s story struck me as the moment that sealed Miller’s temporal doom. It meant that his journey was not going to be as simple as he thought. It was the realization that he had a journey, in the Gilgamesh, Jesus, Buddha kind of way. Miller says that San Francisco felt like a gay utopia in the late 70’s and the death of Harvey Milk shattered that false image. It’s here where the title of Miller’s piece is particularly disturbing. Miller is a highly affective performer, but if and when I have seen him cry, I can’t help but feel that there is still a part of him that is “acting.” This is by no means an admonition, especially since I think that he is only in part acting. The best affective performances are where the performer knows how close they can get to the line and position their performance at that point. Miller excels at this, and as such his performances are emotionally and politically charged. When we hear the last lines of this particular piece, and we hear of the death of Harvey Milk and George Moscone, we don’t see Miller break down. We do not see Miller cry over “Spilt Milk.” Instead, we see the burgeoning political activist coming into his own. We do not see that the utopia was shattered, but that the utopian image was shattered. The utopia never existed. When I was 19 and performing my adaptation of this piece, I focused on the shattering of the image without giving much thought to the particular image that Miller was evoking. In his piece, Miller was remembering a point in time where, for millions of people, an image of what could be seemed so close but was proven to be so very far away. Miller situates this in relation to his own story but is constantly evoking this larger audience.
I look back on my performance at the time and see that what I did was leave the global message that Miller was evoking, totally out of the performance, and focused instead on myself at a particular moment in time. My performance, while highly effective (I drew some conclusions that I otherwise wouldn’t have, and I created an enjoyable thirty minutes of theatre for my audience), was barely, if at all, affective. As such, I allowed my audience and myself to leave the theater unchanged.