THEATER : On the Wings of ‘Angels’ : Stephen Spinella has vaulted from obscurity to widespread acclaim, one Tony and now another nomination for his frighteningly realistic portrayal of AIDS-ravaged Prior Walter in the two-part epic ‘Angels in America’

For most actors, it’s the sound of applause and laughter rippling through the audience that is the most gratifying. But for Stephen Spinella, it’s the sound of gasps. The 37-year-old actor certainly incites his share of them as Prior Walter, the addled and flamboyant scion and reluctant prophet who is at the heart of “Angels in America,” Tony Kushner’s two-part epic about gays, AIDS and Reaganism.

The first murmurs of astonishment usually come from the Broadway audiences near the beginning of Part 1, “Millennium Approaches,” when a naked Spinella, his skinny body covered with lesions, cowers and screams in terror. Another shock wave hits the audience early in Part 2, “Perestroika,” when after tearing around the stage at full tilt, the ailing Prior falls backward in a dead faint.

“I can hear the gasps and then they’re completely quiet,” Spinella says. “They think it’s some horrible mistake. Or that something truly horrible has happened. Which is where you want them.”

Horrible things, of course, do happen in “Angels in America.” But that horror is as often as not followed by something funny, provocative, malevolent or surreal. Prior is the lodestar for the play’s amazing emotional journey, and the shy Spinella has emerged from relative obscurity to share in the honors that have been heaped on the hit drama.

“Angels in America” is divided into two 3 1/2-hour plays--Part 1, “Millennium Approaches,” opened on Broadway in May, 1993; “Perestroika” followed in November and has been playing in repertory with “Millennium” at the Walter Kerr Theatre. The Broadway shows followed productions of both parts in Los Angeles at the Mark Taper Forum in late 1992, and “Millennium Approaches” was also seen in London earlier that year.

A year ago, when “Millennium” swept the Tonys-- taking, among its four awards, one for best play--Spinella took home the trophy for best featured actor in a drama. Now, with “Perestroika” again leading the Tony nominees for drama with six nominations, Spinella is up for best performance by a leading actor in a play. The change in category recognizes his role in Part 2 as more pivotal to the story line.

Whether he will prevail again when the awards are announced June 12 remains to be seen. He’s got stiff competition: Sam Waterston (“Abe Lincoln in Illinois”), Christopher Plummer (“No Man’s Land”) and Brian Bedford (“Timon of Athens”). But whatever the outcome, Spinella says that he’s bound to enjoy this year’s competition a lot more than last year.

“I was a wreck last year,” he says of the sudden onslaught of fame that greeted him as part of the eight-member cast of “Angels.” “Everything happened so fast. This time, whether I win or not, I’m just much more confident about my situation. I’m going to savor every last minute of it.”

If Spinella was not exactly comfortable with Broadway then, the New York audiences nonetheless cottoned to him in a big way. Few characters in recent theater history have generated as much empathy and affection as Prior, a waiter and former drag queen. Abandoned by his lover, he spends much of “Millennium Approaches” coping with the debilitating effects of AIDS while warding off the persistent visitations of a pushy angel. “Perestroika” sees him going sparring with the heavenly principalities and raging around the stage looking like, as one character notes, Morticia Addams.

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Spinella is a close friend of playwright Kushner, who wrote the role with the actor in mind. He began playing Prior in 1989 in readings at San Francisco’s Eureka Theatre, which commissioned the piece, and he was in the first workshop production of “Millennium” at the Taper in May, 1990. Spinella also played Prior in the seven-hour marathon of “Angels” there in 1992.

“There’s something kind of frail about him,” he says of the character’s appeal. “You think he’s going to crumble. And he does. But then he puts himself back together as a much stronger person. There’s something exhilarating about somebody who’s at the bottom and fights back--through humor as much as rage.”

Indeed, Spinella has been so successful in communicating the mesmerizing and horrific world of AIDS to audiences that he has become a poster child of sorts--an image reinforced by a cameo as a dying man with AIDS in the HBO television movie “And the Band Played On.” Offstage, he is often besieged by people inquiring after his health or sending heartfelt notes such as one scrawled on the back of a ticket stub that he keeps taped to his dressing room mirror: “Doug very much wanted to be here. He died of AIDS on Jan. 19, 1993. Thank you.”

Part of the audience’s proprietary attitude toward Spinella stems from the fact that he has a very slender build, which onstage makes him appear emaciated. Audiences have often speculated as to the real state of his health. Nothing to be alarmed about. Much of the frailty is makeup.

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Sitting in his dressing room, having just returned from a vacation in Florida, Spinella exudes health and well-being. As part of a campaign to put pounds on his bony frame, he’s hired a personal trainer. A large bunch of bananas sits amid dried flowers, family photos, pictures of angels and other memorabilia cluttering his dressing room. The room has been painted a color he calls “dusty rose,” and the fluty-voiced reference to his interior-decorating skills is a rare flash of Prior flamboyance. For the most part, his demeanor is serious, almost somber. Dressed conservatively in khakis and a striped shirt, he chooses his words carefully, punctuating them with long pauses.

The actor, a onetime gay activist, reluctantly reveals that he is HIV- negative--(“I don’t believe the community should be divided by those who are positive and those who are negative,” he says)--but he adds that audiences continue to confuse him with the character.

“I don’t really care,” he says. “I’d play another PWA (person with AIDS) in a second if the role was a good one. I really don’t have a problem leaving the role after I leave the theater. It doesn’t persist. But some people can be extremely rude. They come up to me and think they can say stuff like ‘You’re so skinny,’ ‘You should eat more!’ It’s just unbelievably rude.”

After more than 400 Broadway performances, Spinella concedes that summoning up Prior’s febrile exchanges with freshness and spontaneity has been a real challenge of late. The demands, particularly in “Perestroika,” are so physically and emotionally exhausting that Spinella says he had no intention of renewing his contract when it expired in January. Yet the producers prevailed on him to stay on through September.

Persuading him wasn’t that hard, actually. Despite the acclaim for his performance in “Angels,” other offers haven’t exactly poured in. Aside from the role of a gay parent in Michael Tolkin’s forthcoming movie, “The New Age,” which he had to turn down because of scheduling, Spinella says he had no other offers.

He auditioned for the role of a drag queen in the road movie “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar”--a part that eventually went to Patrick Swayze. Even so, Spinella says, he was eager to explore the possibilities of doing film and more TV at the time his contract came up for renewal.

“But then I realized I really wanted to understand the part better, especially in ‘Perestroika,’ which I hadn’t had the chance to play that long,” he says. “When you have a role as well written as this one, you constantly discover new wells of inspiration. It can even get to be a pretty desperate search after a while. You think, ‘ Ohmygod , I’m not deep enough, not honest enough, not funny enough.’ It can be a humbling experience.”

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Spinella says that he has had to plumb his own background and personal life for the compass points that intersect with Prior’s. Unlike the well-born character he plays, Spinella forged his own survival skills in Arizona. His father, a Navy mechanic, moved the large brood after the end of a tour of duty in Italy, where Stephen, the middle son, was born. The close-knit family endured a shock when Stephen’s father died unexpectedly of a heart attack. Though he was only 13 at the time, Spinella soon found himself the head of the household when his older brother and sister moved away to college. Meanwhile, he was coming to grips with his own sexuality.

“I can’t really differentiate between what were the traumas of the situation of my family and the traumas about being terrified of my sexuality,” he says. “They all get mixed up together.”

Spinella found a refuge from both in the high school drama club. Alan D. Perry, who heads one of the many producing entities of “Angels in America,” knew the aspiring actor at Glendale High School near Phoenix and remembered him as someone who was clearly going places, even then.

“My memory of him was as always being incredibly inventive and always the most interesting person to watch,” Perry says. “We lived in a desert community and had that artistic insecurity that comes from living in a place where the seasons don’t change. I remember once at a friend’s house, where we all gathered on Friday evenings to watch ‘Mary Hartman,’ we announced to the group that we were no longer going to meet any more boring people. Only writers, artists and dancers. They looked at us like we were insane.”

Despite Spinella’s many years working in fringe theater before “Angels,” Broadway had long been a goal. The actor says that he even moved from Arizona to New York in 1978 to attend the graduate acting program at New York University, because, as he put it, “I’d be one step closer to actually being on Broadway.” It worked. He met Kushner.

After seeing Spinella in a university production, Kushner, then a first-year directing student, invited him to be in his play “The Age of Assassins,” a four-hour political saga about American anarchists at the turn of the century.

“I started writing roles for Stephen because the first time I saw him I knew he was a truly great actor,” Kushner says. “He has immense emotional depth, great range and an extraordinarily facility for stylized language. He really knows how to do my stuff.”

Spinella characterizes many of the roles Kushner has written for him as “fierce and angry men.” Those have included a curmudgeonly amateur scientist and archeologist in “Hydriotaphia,” an irascible early capitalist in “Heavenly Theatre,” a leering cleric in “La Fin de la Baleine” and the gay intellectual in an early production of Kushner’s previously best-known work, “A Bright Room Called Day.”

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In fact, the nadir of Spinella’s career was when Kushner received his first major New York production with “A Bright Room Called Day” at the Public Theatre in 1990, and Spinella wasn’t invited to come along. The director, Michael Greif (who has since become artistic director at the La Jolla Playhouse), refused to cast him.

“I was completely devastated. I was really very, very upset,” Spinella recalls. “I had contributed a lot to that part, and Tony worked very hard to get me into that production. Michael simply thought another actor would be better.”

Spinella’s crisis of confidence almost led him to pull out of the inaugural workshop production of “Angels in America.”

“I just thought this is the way it’s going to be for the rest of my life,” he says. “I’m going to be doing the plays in the small theaters for not much money, and when it comes to New York, it’s going to go to somebody else.”

But Spinella persevered, buoyed by Kushner’s guarantee that he would be a part of “Angels” no matter where it was produced. Through the various readings and workshops, the actor put his personal stamp on Prior--so much so that now it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the role, either on Broadway or in Robert Altman’s upcoming films of “Angels in America.” There will be a movie for each part, produced by Fine Line Features, with production now scheduled for next spring. Anxious not to jinx his chances to land the film role, Spinella declines to comment on the Altman production except to say, nervously, that his fingers are crossed.

Meanwhile, the actor continues to live in the modest East Village apartment he’s had for 15 years. He recently separated from his lover of the past four years, a result, he says, of “two strong-headed people who have different ideas of where they want to live their lives.” These days, Spinella’s life appears to be equal parts monasticism and glamour: the monkish existence of playing eight performances at such a high pitch that long telephone conversations are out of the question, next to the experience of meeting such idols as Diana Ross, whom he told: “I’ve got a recording of every sound you’ve ever made.”

As for the life and career he envisions for himself after “Angels,” Spinella will only say: “The next play I want to do is one that lasts 90 minutes, is all jokes, one costume, one set and very, very easy. No gasps, no groans, just lots of laughter--Please!”*