THEATER NIGHT. Tim Miller has been at the performance-art game for decades, and was a player in the NEA funding wars of the 80s, which seem to be making a comeback these days. He tours a lot and has a new show, Lay of the Land, at P.S. 122, where I saw him Thursday night.

Though I thought I'd seen every crackpot thing in New York in the 80s (I recall with particular fondness one performance in some fetid basement where a guy smashed beer bottles against the wall and then demolished a cinder block with a sledgehammer), I'd never seen Miller work before. Lay of the Land was mostly story-telling about his challenged life as a gay man in unfriendly America, with some slides and props. His stories, from his childhood and adulthood, explained both the origins and the depths of his outrage, which has led him into political action as well as performances.

However, the impression he left me was not of outrage, but of disciplined passion. As with many other performance artists I've seen, evident expense of energy seems to be part of his act; he motormouthed, he gesticulated, he stalked the stage. But he wasn't sloppy and I never got the feeling that he was trying to alert us to his capacity to go suddenly to outrage or violence (the flashing of which trump card is not unknown among many kinds of performers). He has obviously worked to keep his body, breathing and enunciation in condition, and the whole thing was carefully modulated. What tension there was came from the stories.

The political attitude expressed by those stories would be familiar, perhaps overly so, to anyone who would go to such a performance; it was his metaphors, and the eloquent way he expressed them, that put it as far as it went above agitprop. At one point he described himself as an already-gay kid having a dinner-table argument with his father about going to a baseball game, and suddenly choking on a piece of chuck steak. This led quickly to both lascivious and existential references of "biting off more than I can chew," to his feeling of being choked as a homosexual in a country that wants him silent and invisible, and (when the father prepares to perform an emergency tracheotomy on him) to the Bible story of Abraham and Isaac, to Caravaggio images of which he used to masturbate. It's no shock Tony Kushner is a fan of Miller's. They both have that tendency to reach through the ridiculous to the sublime.

At one point Miller seemed ready (if the audience would support him) to burn a flag in protest. I was surprised. Then he said he couldn't do it, even if they wanted him to, because he still believed in the promise of America. I still entertain a sneaking suspicion that he isn't eager to bite off more than he can chew anymore -- NEA pays some of P.S. 122's bills. A more charitable explanation would be that Miller, who's talented enough to have done plenty of other things with his time, is not inclined toward the quick shock, but for the long haul, if it's more likely to lead to victory.