Stephen Spinella (born October 11, 1956)

[reviews_and_ramblings]

Stephen Nicholas Spinella (born 11 October 1956) is an American stage, television, and film actor.

Spinella was born in Naples, Italy to a father who was an American naval airplane mechanic. He grew up in Glendale, Arizona and graduated from the University of Arizona drama department. He also attended New York University's Graduate Acting Program at the Tisch School of the Arts, graduating in 1982. He won consecutive Tony-awards for Best Featured Actor and Best Actor for his performance as Prior Walter in Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and Angels in America: Perestroika respectively. He was also nominated for Best Featured Actor in a Musical for James Joyce's The Dead.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Spinella

Further Readings:

Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS (Unnatural Acts: Theorizing the Performative) by David Roman
Paperback: 384 pages
Publisher: Indiana University Press; 1St Edition edition (February 22, 1998)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0253211689
ISBN-13: 978-0253211682
Amazon: Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS

Acts of Intervention examines the ways that gay men have used theatre and performance to intervene in the AIDS crisis. It discusses dramatic texts and public performances—from cabarets and candlelight vigils to full-scale Broadway productions such as Angels in America and Rent—that have shaped, and been shaped by, the history of AIDS in national, regional, and local contexts. Román examines mainstream as well as alternative and activist forms of theatre, including solo performance, community-based projects, mixed-media events, activist demonstrations, and AIDS educational theatre initiatives.

Acts of Intervention traces the ways in which performance and theater have participated in and informed the larger cultural politics of race, sexuality, citizenship, and AIDS in the United States during the last fifteen years. The book discusses not only how the theater has provided a forum for gay male response to the epidemic but also the degree to which those responses have in turn shaped the ideological formulation of AIDS. Román offers a new method for mapping the relation between AIDS and representation by combining interpretive strategies from performance theory, gay and lesbian studies, critical race discourse, and cultural studies.

This book is dedicated to writing the history of theatrical interventions in the AIDS epidemic, including performances whose official history has been largely neglected or forgotten. Because many early performances about AIDS left little or no documentation, the task of constructing an AIDS theatre historiography confronts immediate problems and limitations.

Acts of Intervention argues that the history of AIDS performance is located at the juncture of memory and disappearance, of mourning and survival, of representation and its impossibility in the context of epidemic loss.

Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches by Tony Kushner
Paperback: 136 pages
Publisher: Theatre Communications Group; First Edition edition (May 1, 1993)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1559360615
ISBN-13: 978-1559360616
Amazon: Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches

The most anticipated new American play of the decade, this brilliant work is an emotional, poetic, political epic in two parts: Millennium Approaches and Perestroika. Spanning the years of the Reagan administration, it weaves the lives of fictional and historical characters into a feverish web of social, political, and sexual revelations.

Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika by Tony Kushner
Paperback: 158 pages
Publisher: Theatre Communications Group; First Edition edition (November 1, 1993)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1559360739
ISBN-13: 978-1559360739
Amazon: Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika

The second half of the author's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, Angels in America, follows the characters introduced in Millennium Approaches into the 1990s as they continue to struggle with the ravages of AIDS. Original.