Michael Dale's Theatre Crawl - “If Shakespeare had a psychiatrist we would not have had his plays or sonnets.”
By Michael Dale
John Kelly and Lola Pashalinski in Underneath The Skin (Photo: Albie Mitchell)
This week…
Underneath The Skin at La MaMa through December 18. Tickets $30, Students/Seniors $25.
Dead + Alive at the Connelly Theater through December 10. Tickets $25.
Peter Pan-Sexual at Don’t Tell Mama through December 12. Tickets $30 plus $20 minimum.
“If Shakespeare had a psychiatrist we would not have had his plays or sonnets.”
So speaks Gertrude Stein, lovingly portrayed on film by Obie-winner Lola Pashalinski, in the frequently honored, multi-hyphenated performance artist John Kelly’s Underneath The Skin; a poetically staged life-collage of tattoo artist, erotic novelist and liver of life, Samuel Stewart (1909-1993).
I’m no expert on the subject, but I’ve had enough camaraderie with artistic folks to know there’s a kind of madness that is released in creative expression that could be lost if suppressed.
Sadly, Stewart lived most of his life during a time when psychiatrists would have thought there was madness in one of the things he naturally, and harmlessly, was.
For a reminder, arrive a little early to La MaMa for a pre-performance slide show depicting sweet vintage photos of gay couples kissing, cuddling and being otherwise romantic with each other, which is occasionally interrupted by newspaper headlines flaunting words like “degenerates” and worse. You might catch a look at someone’s undesirable discharge papers from the U.S. Army, or mug shots of a woman with the word “lesbian” scribbled below.
Accompanied by the live trio of John William Watkins, Hucklefaery and Estado Flotante, director/choreographer/set and video designer Kelly portrays Stewart and shapes his subject’s words into what is subtitled “A Penetrative Portrayal of a Queer Giant.” Press material explains that while the lives of pre-Stonewall LGBT+ people have mostly gone undocumented, erased or forgotten, Stewart left extensive documentation of his experiences as a gay man during a time when secrecy and silence was a manner of survival, including a “stud file” of his sexual encounters, many experienced while tattooing sailors stationed in Chicago. (The file would catch the interest of both Alfred Kinsey and, decades later, New York’s Museum of Sex.)
I’ll leave it to the artists to reveal what souvenir a young Stewart received from Rudolph Valentino after a visit to his hotel room, and the special connection he felt to Oscar Wilde during a tryst with the playwright’s former lover, Lord Alfred Douglas.
Travels in Europe introduced him to literary circles and in time the graphic descriptions of his group sex encounters were fictionalized for popular pulp novels published under a penname.
Stewart declares early on in the piece that he, like any other person, is more than just his sexuality, but Kelly has stated that one of his purposes in staging the man’s words is to make younger gay people more aware of the rich and robust lives their predecessors managed to live while in the shadows.
Tom Brokaw famously referred to the Americans whose lives were shaped by living through the Depression and World War II as The Greatest Generation. Underneath The Skin can serve as a reminder that this demographic also includes people like Samuel Stewart, whose lives were further shaped by The Lavender Scare, Stonewall and the AIDS epidemic.
“Circuses are not known for safety,”…
…explains performer/co-director Pher in her program notes for Dead + Alive, a very funny and extraordinarily touching clown piece inspired by the Jewish mourning custom of assigning a guardian, called a shomer, to remain with the deceased’s body to comfort the part of their soul that remains until burial, keeping it from transforming into a malicious dybbuk.
Though played by an ensemble of four, the hour-long piece is primarily a showcase for the fascinating performance skills of Helen Hayes Award and Edinburgh Stage Award winning co-director Richard Saudek, who conceived and developed it during a fellowship with LABA: A Laboratory For Jewish Culture.
Richard Saudek and Dana Dailey in Dead + Alive. (Photo: Russ Rowland)
After some clever pre-show antics by musician Benjamin Domask-Ruh, who accents the mostly silent performers with some honky-tonk piano and sound effects from various noisemaking devices, we’re treated to some traditional merriment by Saudek and his partner, played by Dana Daily. It’s all quite charming and silly until something unexpected occurs, and Daily is left to care for Saudek’s suddenly still body.
Well, not exactly still. Dead and alive is the name of a classic routine where one clown can’t keep their dead partner’s body from randomly moving. But while the pair still evoke laughter with their bits, Daily’s frustration is tinged with grief that grows deeper and deeper, while Saudek, with his broad facial expressions and eccentric physicality, seems to be portraying a lost soul frightened and confused by its new reality.
Rather than going for the macabre, Dead + Alive is incredibly moving because it’s played for absolute sincerity, realistically depicting the sorrow of loss in a world of humor. It’s beautifully funny.
“Are you sure you're ready for a land where a little white boy never has to grow up? Where he has zero responsibility or accountability for his actions?”
Oddly enough, the title character’s sexuality is never brought up in Robert K. Benson’s British Panto for adults, Peter Pan-Sexual, but such personal matters are really no one else’s business, especially when there are children to enchant, a shadow to find and pirates to foil.
Don’t expect a nuanced exploration of J. M. Barrie’s classic tale of the boy who, despite never having grown up, still managed to have a popular syndrome named after him. Nah, this is bawdy, campy and proudly trashy business used primarily to shoot one-liner zingers at such targets as Ted Cruz, Patti LuPone, Beanie Feldstein, Staten Island, creepy Times Square characters and the political incorrectness of past adaptations of the Pan story.
Gina Tonic and Lily Ali-Oshatz in Peter Pan-Sexual
So I was happy to check my dignity at the door and kick back with director David Charles’ grandly hammy cast. Drag artist Gina Tonic portrayed the traditional pantomime dame who, assisted by genial stagehand Gary (Gabriel Spector), gave the audience a quick lesson in how to cheer for Lily Ali-Oshatz’s indomitably cocky Peter and jeer Rachel McPhee’s snarling Captain Hook in proper British Panto style.
Curtain Line…
A casino in Times Square? If people want to gamble in the Theatre District, how about a place where they can invest in new plays and original musicals?