Billed as “A Penetrating Portrayal of A Queer Giant,” performance artist John Kelly’s explosive gay-themed show, Underneath The Skin, bolstered by actor/dancers Hucklefaery aka Ken Mechler, Estado Flotante, and John Williams Watkins, each playing multiple characters, a slew of videos (one featuring Lola as Gertrude Stein), lots of song and dance, oodles of simulated male to male sex, and a cornucopia of informative lecture-like projections, all centering around the life and work of little known historical footnote Samuel Steward (1909-1993) (as played by Kelly), is currently holding court at the La MaMa Experimental Theater Club in New York City at the Ellen Stewart Theater
Commissioned by the Skirball Center, which first produced Skin in 2019, the piece is essentially a gay history lesson using the extraordinary life of Ohio born Samuel Steward (1909-1993) as a template.
The play begins, even before it begins, with a kind of a primer which introduces the audience, thus setting the mood of what is to follow during the next 85 minutes, with a series of immediately recognizable historical era-setting, fast-moving images projected on a large screen accompanied by period songs from Steward’s lifetime, no doubt personally chosen by John Kelly himself.
Using Samuel Steward’s own words, culled from his diaries, journals, memoir, novels, lectures, and interviews, the play, if one can call it that, presented in a series of vignettes, mostly in chronological order, covers Steward’s storied life, often in lurid detail, from age 17 to just before his death at age 84. Though living during the years when just being a homosexual was looked upon as a sickness, as well as illegal, and subject to arrest, fines, and even jail, staying in the closet, which Steward embraced for much of his life, was one’s safest bet. Still, the handsome Steward, with a PhD in English Literature, did not let any of this curb his insatiable sexual appetite.
As Steward frankly writes, “I went to college with the major purpose of bringing pleasure to others; mainly straight young men, and not to be concerned about pleasuring myself – for in bringing it to those I admired, I did please myself. Another aim? Oh, yes – to get an education.”
As the play both shows and tells us, no matter where he was or what he was doing at the time – a tattoo artist, a writer, a sometime actor, a pornographer, an unofficial collaborator at the Kinsey institute, even an alcoholic in a stupor for some 17 years – he continued to follow his great love of pleasuring. This led to a tryst with Rudolf Valentino, an affair with Oscar Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, and playwright Thornton Wilder. Hobnobbing around the world, Steward was also befriended by writers Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau. Andre Gide, Thomas Mann, and Julian Green.
Beneath the Skin ends with John Kelly at his most emotionally moving, channeling the 84-year-old Steward as he sings Judee Sill’s somber 1973 song “The Kiss” which has Steward, long past his salad day, wishing for one last kiss.
