NYT (Underneath The Skin)

You might not expect a show about a man who wrote for the Illinois Dental Journal to come with a warning about “nudity, graphic images and adult themes.” But Samuel Steward, the subject of John Kelly’s “Underneath the Skin,” which begins previews at La MaMa on Thursday, may well be one of the wildest figures to ever prowl the outer reaches of American literature.

Steward was an academic and a tattoo artist, a friend of Gertrude Stein’s who had trysts with Rudolph Valentino and Thornton Wilder, and such a meticulous documentarian of his own sex life that his extensive records, which included a detailed “Stud File,” were catnip to a certain Alfred C. Kinsey.

“With this one, I just had to go for the gusto,” Kelly, 63, said of the piece, which he wrote, designed, directed and stars in. (Three other actors play various characters, and Lola Pashalinski appears on video as Stein.) “I’m at the point where I want to say ‘Screw you’ to everything, in a good way, and kind of puncture through a membrane of whatever’s left of propriety in my life.”

 

Photo above: John Kelly at La MaMa Experimental Theater Club in Manhattan. The show makes audiences acknowledge the “history of gay and lesbian and trans people who found ways of having a life when there were so many risks,” he said.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York Times

 

 

Source: New York Times:  

“Dramatizing the Story of a Gay Mid-Century Tattoo Artist Who Was So Much More.” 

By Elisabeth Vincentelli