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

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.”

Steward, who died at 84 in 1993, realized he was gay when he was quite young, and he steadfastly remained true to himself in an era less than hospitable to his kind. Even as society became more accepting, he was an outlier.

This made him an ideal subject for Kelly, a polymathic visual artist, writer and performer with a decades-long history of creating shows about such real-life figures as Egon Schiele, Joni Mitchell, Caravaggio and the cross-dressing trapeze artist Barbette, each of whom he turned into characters in dance-theater fantasias. But even compared to those subjects, Steward led an extraordinary life — Justin Spring’s biography, “Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade,” which was nominated for a National Book Award in 2010, is an eye-popping, mind-blowing page-turner.

“Underneath the Skin” guides us through Steward’s early years and sexual adventures, his trips to Europe in the 1930s, where he met Stein, Thomas Mann and Lord Alfred Douglas. (The show also elegantly brings to life its subject’s taste for group sex.)

Feeling stifled by his American milieu’s oppressive propriety, Steward embraced a new creative outlet in the early 1950s. “He became enamored with tattoo culture, the underworld aspect of it, the sexy aspect of it, the human-contact aspect of it,” Kelly said.

Steward started practicing tattooing on Chicago’s Skid Row, often applying his skills (in more ways than one) on sailors from the nearby Great Lakes training station; eventually he resettled in Berkeley, Calif., where he counted the local Hells Angels among his clients. That his canvasses included both the scandalous director Kenneth Anger (who had the word “Lucifer” tattooed across his chest) and Frederick IX, King of Denmark (whom he invited to drop into his shop), is a testimony to the range of people Steward encountered. Those extremes are reflected in a life where the literati rubbed elbows with rough trade, and violence was a frequent occurrence — sometimes consensual (this sadomasochism aficionado titled his general-interest column in the Illinois Dental Journal “The Victim’s Viewpoint”) and sometimes not.

Through it all, Steward never stopped writing: There was the Stud File (the subject of a Museum of Sex exhibition, “Obscene Diary,” in 2011) but also a detailed journal, essays, fiction. After a “legitimate” novel tanked in 1936, he went on to publish, under the name Phil Andros, erotic pulp fiction. Walking over to a low table in his living room, Kelly picked up some Andros books, including “The Boys in Blue” and “Greek Ways,” that he had managed to procure. “They were very expensive,” he said with a sigh.

Steward’s punctilious, frank documentation of his sexual adventures was one of the things that appealed to Kelly, himself a diarist whose decades-long practice fueled his 2018 “live memoir” of a show “Time No Line.” But despite the abundance of biographical material, the new piece, which was first presented at N.Y.U. Skirball in 2019, is not a straightforward retelling. “Samuel Steward touched every single aspect of gay male sexuality over the course of the 20th century, and his life demanded to be theatricalized in some form, and obviously not in an episodic manner,” said Jay Wegman, the director of N.Y.U. Skirball, who commissioned the show. “John’s interpretation is more a meditation on his life.”

The show is designed as a series of vignettes pulled from many stages of Steward’s life, sometimes re-enacting scenes he had described in his diary. To properly channel him, Kelly immersed himself in primary sources. “I wanted to find as many of his actual words as I could,” he said. “I had to find his voice, see photographs of him at different points in his life, see his drawings, see his tattoo designs, and develop a sense of his trajectory. What kind of flesh do you put on the bones? That’s a recipe of movement, of design, of video, of music.”

For him, “Underneath the Skin” is a semaphore that signals a presence now too easy to forget. “I’m trying, in a polite way, to shove this story down people’s throats — meaning the 20th-century history of gay and lesbian and trans people who found ways of having a life when there were so many risks,” he said. “What makes him unique is the fact that his ephemera comes down to us so we have actual proof, so to speak, of his existence.”

The specifics of Steward’s life can feel remote today, yet one thing still resonates loudly — his formidable will to be true to himself, and to connect. “Even when he’s musing on mortality and old age at the end of the piece, there’s still these images that come in the video of that quest for contact,” Kelly said. “It’s human nature: We need to make contact, we need to find warmth.”