Jennifer Miller, with her agile frame and scraggly face, is a sight that takes some getting used to. Peeking from behind the wings of the Seaver Theater’s main stage in the moments before her solo show "Morphadyke: The Personal Show," she looked like any theater tech assistant who’d let their beard go untrimmed for the last few days. When she bounded on stage to the sounds of Appalachian folk music in an oversized men’s suit and converse shoes, circling a small spotlight in a chaotic swirl of arms and legs, my face froze quizzically. Weirdly genderless in my narrow conception of what it means to be a man or women, she shattered my standard perceptions of sex, gender, beauty, and acceptability——if only for a moment.

Then she spoke. And suddenly it was Jennifer Miller, a "self proclaimed " woman with a beard." A woman. With a beard. With one sentence, she made that normal.

Dan May Jennifer Miller: foxy lady.

I suppose, or perhaps hope, that the vast majority of anything written on Ms. Miller, the star of the ‘96 documentary Juggling Gender, starts off in this banal fashion: initial curious shock dissolves to ready acceptance. It is the nature of her act. After her spiraling opening dance, the lights quickly changed and, heaving with obvious exhaustion, she smiled to the audience and declared "After that opening I just can’t go on—— I mean with the heavy breathing and the dizziness, whew!" She then proceeded to juggle five balls.

Throughout the show, she maintained this steady informal, connection with the audience, mugging as I snapped a photo, asking us to sing along with her warped folk song, even going so far as to call someone (presumably a friend) up out of the audience to get her a new light bulb when her pleas to the tech crew went unheeded. This is not simply an unconscious matter of style. When she beckoned to the audience to "come see the sideshows, where it’s all real, it’s all a lie, it’s all on the inside," or twirled five hula hoops to the song "Come Look at the Freaks," it became obvious that her intimate presentation is part of a larger goal.

Throughout Morphadyke, Miller’s demeanor——warm, hammy, hilarious, and at times odd——clashed with her subject matter. If nothing else, this is a show about what we conceive of as weirdness: puppet shows about accidentally drinking a certain testosterone-laden, jelly-like substance along with the punch, straight jacket escapes, juggling machetes, swallowing fire–being a women and having a beard. Presenting these oddities in such an amiable, approachable, comfortable manner forced us to accept them as part of our world.

This theme was made painfully clear when Miller recited Ginsburg’s "Footnote to Howl" while chewing (and finally swallowing) a glass light bulb. "Holy sea, holy railroad, holy locomotive, holy visions," she chanted as the crunching glass amplified through the theater. We squealed, squirmed, and ultimately cried "Ok I get it everything is beautiful–your beard, the fire, the machetes, even the eating of the glass–now please make it stop."

But little of the show worked as cohesively as "Eating the Light." She welcomed us to the sideshow, and then showed us through the acts. The puppet show "Francis Francine" was incomprehensible, the "Short Talk" quoting Barbara Kirschenblat-Gimblett’s "Objects of Ethnography" was obliterated by the sight of Miller’s adept arms rolling a ball around her arms and chest. The ball juggling was intricate, the straight jacket escape impressive, the machete juggling, I don’t know, "death defying," and the fire eating scary. But rarely did the supposed content of the piece and its form meet in any kind of meaningful destination.

When Miller came to the campuses last year, she apparently said midway through her act, "see, it’s funny because I’m a woman with a beard and I’m juggling," and perhaps I am wrong to criticize that notion, for such self-realization is certainly not without its complexities. But Miller intentionally shied from delving any deeper. Morphadyke fell victim to that delicate balance within art, and especially within performance art: how does one combine accessibility with subject matter that is either daunting in its depth or intimidating in its difficulty? This is, of course, all the more challenging when the performer is a woman who happens to have a beard, a woman whose very appearance is inaccessible. Miller forced us to reexamine what we perceive as normal, woman-like, and acceptable. In order to do so, however, she hesitated from examining the important complexities and difficulties within our constructions of gender, art, and normalcy.