Original ‘Angels’ star Spinella to join Berkeley run
Tony winner says he was ‘terrified’ to play Roy Cohn
Stephen Spinella, who originated the role of Prior in Eureka Theatre’s 1991 world premiere of “Angels in America,” will return to the Bay Area in April for Berkeley Repertory Theater’s much anticipated production of Tony Kushner’s landmark play. This time, Spinella will play Roy Cohn.
Berkeley Rep announced the cast of the play on Thursday, Jan. 4, with Randy Harrison (“Queer as Folk”) playing Prior and Caldwell Tidicue (also known as Bob the Drag Queen) as Belize. Rounding out the cast are Danny Binstock as Joe, Randy Danson as the Angel, Benjamin T. Ismail as Louis, Bethany Jillard as Harper and Carmen Roman as Hannah. The company’s artistic director, Tony Taccone, who directed the Eureka production, will helm the revival as well. The play will run April 17-July 22.
Spinella won two Tonys for playing Prior, one for each of the play’s two parts, “Millennium Approaches” and “Perestroika.” At Berkeley Rep’s production, he’ll reunite with Taccone, who with the Public Theater’s Oskar Eustis directed Mark Taper Forum’s 1992 production of “Angels,” which included the world premiere of the play’s second part, “Perestroika.”
Spinella says over the phone that he was initially “terrified” of playing Cohn, even if Kushner takes some artistic license with the notorious lawyer known for his role in the conviction of Julius and Ethel Rosen-
berg, as well as his work with Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump.
“I don’t get him, or I didn’t,” Spinella says. But he’s found multiple entries into the character, first from Kushner’s recommendation that he read “Citizen Cohn,” a biography by Nicholas von Hoffman, and then from a text Kushner sent.
Kushner “can be very confusing in long-form,” Spinella says. “The best form to get him in is shortform, like in a text, because he’ll just say one or two things.” The word from Kushner that stuck with him is “vitality,” especially since Cohn, a closeted gay man diagnosed with AIDS, spends all of “Perestroika” in bed.
At first, Spinella hated that, for its limitations on his expressivity. But he realized that “for Roy, it’s all about getting out of that bed.” In his vision, Cohn doesn’t fear death itself; “I think he’s scared that he’s not going to have control anymore.
“I want that disease to have to claw him down to the earth,” he continues. “For me, it will be a successful performance if people go away absolutely horrified by the viciousness of the illness, if they find some measure of integrity in the degree to which Roy fights the illness.”
Spinella says that when he was working on the premiere of “Angels” at San Francisco’s Eureka Theatre, then located on 16th Street, he wasn’t conscious that the play would go on to become the game-changer it was for American theater. Mostly, he says, he was just happy to have a job.
But in retrospect, he says, “The measure of a really, really great play is it constantly defies definition. You can’t really say what ‘Angels in America’ is. You can’t really reduce it to issues of plot point. You can’t say it’s an AIDS play; you can’t really just say it’s a play about America.” A play like “Angels” “satisfies and challenges on multiple levels, and you can do multiple productions of it, of great success, and have them be radically different from each other.”