He’s trying out a different role

Soon after graduating from high school in Glendale, Ariz., Stephen Spinella took flying lessons at the Phoenix airport. He wanted to travel, and he figured that’s what airline pilots did.

He got his license, but he never piloted another airplane. “I hated every second of it,” he says. “Pulling a Cessna 150 out of a stall was not my idea of a good time.”

Spinella, 48, instead became one of his generation’s most celebrated stage actors, winning two Tony awards in successive years for playing Prior Walter in the two parts of Tony Kushner’s epic “Angels in America.”

Now, however, Spinella is once again a kind of pilot. He’s making his professional debut as a director at the helm of Andrew Bovell’s “Speaking in Tongues,” an Open Fist-Powerhouse Theatre co-production at the Powerhouse in Santa Monica.

Last week, after a run-through of the mysterious Australian drama about two couples, Spinella sat in an aisle seat and spoke for more than an hour to the designers, cast and crew, who were scattered throughout the audience seats. Referring to notes he had taken while he watched, he mixed words of praise with calm, clear requests for changes. He went over details about the design elements, line deliveries from the cast and the bigger picture.

“The pace was fantastic -- it was really great,” he told the actors. “You’ve earned the places where you can slow down. You have to give them to us. Be stingy about those important moments -- but when you decide on one, give it to us.”

His apparent confidence was a far cry from his first stab at directing, in a class at the University of Arizona. There, he staged two scenes from “The Subject Was Roses.” At the first performance, “I sat on the floor behind the last row of seats cowering, as if I had created such a disastrous mess that somehow I would die and be removed from the pain. I felt so exposed and naked.”

Those are adjectives that actors often use -- after all, they’re actually on stage in front of the audience. But Spinella notes that the actors have a degree of control once a performance begins. “When you’re the director, you can’t do or say anything once it starts. Control is relinquished. It’s what you have wrought. You can’t re-wrought.”

For his next class project, he staged Shakespeare’s assassination of Julius Caesar. This time, he wasn’t as scared -- and the initial results were “awful,” he says. “It was this incredibly formal event.” Finally, one of his friends who was in the cast told him it was terrible. “We’ve got to go in there and kill [Caesar],” the friend said. Spinella conceded that she was right, and the scene then “became incredibly violent and ugly.”

After that, Spinella concentrated on acting. But he has seldom been passive. What he calls the “exquisite” training he received as a graduate student at New York University taught him how to break down a script into its smallest components, which is exactly what a director must do, he says. “So when I work with directors who don’t have that rigor, I get angry. I feel I’m being cheated. I try to solve the problems myself in the scenes I’m in,” doing “a tender dance around everybody, who I hope will accept that I’m overstepping my bounds.”

He’s even an active participant in productions staged by directors he admires. Rehearsing David Rabe’s “A Question of Mercy” in New York, he told director Doug Hughes -- one of his favorites, he says -- “if I’m talking too much, tell me to shut up.”

Hughes, recalling the conversation, says he told Spinella, “You’re very promiscuous with the favors of your remarkable mind,” and urged him to keep talking. Hughes adds: “He does have a remarkable mind, a fantastic radar for the stage. It’s wonderful that he wants to direct.”

But despite Spinella’s many ideas, there was one topic that stopped him short when he thought about directing: design.

“I’ve always felt that I would get trapped in a visual mind-set, and I wouldn’t realize it until it was too late” -- after the sets were built and ready to go. “That has been my greatest fear. Part of what got me over it was doing the design work in my New York apartment.”

He also sought counsel from “Angels” costar Joe Mantello, who had switched from acting to staging and had become one of Broadway’s top directors. “He told me you have to trust the designers you hire and talk to them about the play as you do with the actors.”

After Spinella achieved fame as an actor, his agent began inquiring about directing possibilities, “but then I would get white with panic, and I would accept an acting job that conflicted with whatever I might direct.”

He appeared in “Stuff Happens” at the Mark Taper Forum in the spring, and his fellow cast member Anna Khaja suggested that Spinella might want to direct for Open Fist, of which she’s a member. The scheduled director of “Speaking in Tongues” had left because of a scheduling conflict. Spinella had previously read and liked a few scenes from the play but had never read nor seen the entire play nor the movie, “Lantana,” based on it.

He was interested -- if he could conquer his design anxiety. He discussed it with Open Fist artistic director Martha Demson, who assured him that the company’s designers were well positioned to support him, she says. “I knew he would be impeccable with the actors and the text. He had such a great grasp of the play.” Spinella is particularly pleased with the way he has adapted to the fact that the theater has no wings. At first he didn’t know what to do with a bed that is the primary set piece of the first act. But he now believes “that if I had all the wing space and all the money, I would stage it exactly the same. You have to make a virtue out of an insurmountable obstacle.”

This is often the case in L.A.’s small theaters. Spinella -- who maintains a mid-Wilshire apartment with his boyfriend, teacher Marco Ceballos -- says he loves that he’s doing his first professional directing in L.A.: “You go to New York to be aggressive in the theater. You’re under the burden of blowing the roof off -- or what’s the point? But in fact there are many points to hit before the roof is destroyed. Here, you don’t feel you have to make the greatest artistic statement of the decade.”

He finds directing “hugely exciting. When you solve the puzzle, it’s a thrill. But it’s not like acting -- you don’t do it. You inspire and cajole.” The “ego bloat” is so great, “I feel like a blimp.”

He won’t forgo acting for directing, he says. “In my soul I’m an actor.” But, he predicts, he will direct again “many, many times.”

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‘Speaking in Tongues’

Where: Powerhouse Theatre, 3116 2nd St., Santa Monica

When: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays

Ends: Oct. 8

Price: $20, pay-what-you-can Sundays

Contact: (323) 882-6912; www.powerhousetheatre.com