Kelly, John (Artist)

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

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    “Underneath the Skin,” a theater piece by John Kelly, meditates on the life of Samuel Steward, who always lived boldly when others dared not.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.John Kelly in “Underneath the Skin” at La MaMa Experimental Theater Club. The show is designed as a series of vignettes pulled from many stages of Steward’s life.Albie Mitchell“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.Kelly has created shows about such real-life figures as Egon Schiele, Joni Mitchell and the cross-dressing trapeze artist Barbette, each of whom he turned into characters in dance-theater fantasias.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesThrough 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.” More

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      ‘God’s Fool’ Review: A Singing, Beat Poet Saint

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      In Martha Clarke’s piece about St. Francis of Assisi, at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theater, the song carries the dance.The life of St. Francis of Assisi was a dramatic one. The child of a wealthy Italian merchant, he had a 12th-century playboy youth, went to war and spent a year in captivity. He had mystical visions, stole from his disapproving father to give to the church and devoted himself to a life of poverty in imitation of Christ, founding a religious order. He saw God in nature, thanking the sun, preaching to birds — setting an example of equality and ecology followed by many, including the current Pope.Very little of this drama registers in “God’s Fool,” the dance theater work about Francis that opened at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theater on Thursday. And despite being conceived and directed by Martha Clarke, the creator of many acclaimed dance theater pieces, “God’s Fool” contains very little dance theater.Instead, Francis (Patrick Andrews) and his followers mostly wander around a gravel-strewn stage in friars’ robes, talking about God and faith. When in doubt, they sing.That’s not a problem in itself, since the singing, mostly unaccompanied, is excellent. Arranged and directed by Arthur Solari, it helps establish the world from the start, as the cloaked cast enters intoning an Easter vigil. And the frequent retreat into song gives a sense of a confused flock clinging to fellowship.But the singing does contribute to some of the show’s confusion of time and genre. The selections stray from Francis’s time into an African American spiritual and some Gustav Mahler. When Francis breaks into a Broadway-style duet of the American folk song “Wayfaring Stranger” with Clare, the female member of his flock, we’re definitely not in Assisi anymore.Andrews’s Francis is wholly American, a lost boy. In manner, he wouldn’t seem out of place in a David Mamet play or maybe “Rent.” He does big swings of mood, laughing hysterically, weeping when necessary, mooning over nature like a Beat poet. The saint must have been disruptive, bewildering figure, but when Francis’s exasperated father calls him a bum and a brat, it feels all-too accurate.This central performance is at odds with Fanny Howe’s poetic text. The script is spare, alternating between soliloquies and scenes that aren’t naturalistic dialogue but exchanges of fragments. A representative one goes like this:Francis: Beat me Leo.Leo: I can’t beat you Francis.Luca: You should join the circus, Francis.Francis: I should die.The delivery makes this and many similar exchanges unintentionally comic. The veteran performance artist John Kelly, playing a red-horned devil who accompanies Francis and his followers, contributes some intentional comedy and commedia dell’arte flavor. But neither Kelly nor oversize animal heads (masks by Margie Jervis) nor between-scenes bits of movement (everyone blown by the wind or carrying Francis aloft) compensate enough to give the production the strangeness and wonder it needs.And so, while some of the dramatic incidents in Francis’s life are covered — abuse from his father, the preaching to birds, the appearance of stigmata and, more boldly, kissing Clare and the devil — almost nothing comes across convincingly or illuminatingly.What resonates, along with the singing, is something unsung but latent in Howe’s words: “revelations of a world just an inch from our senses, like perfumes you can’t see, perfumes you catch from a May tree.” What “God’s Fool” might have revealed.God’s FoolThrough July 2 at Ellen Stewart Theater; lamama.org. More