Generations of Angels: Randy Harrison and Stephen Spinella bring Kushner’s masterwork back to where it started
“When I was sixteen, I came out to my parents,” says actor Randy Harrison, best known for playing Justin in the Showtime version of Queer As Folk. “Two weeks later, we were on our annual family trip to New York. I was a real theater kid and my parents always let me choose what we’d see together. And that year, I picked Angels in America.”
This was 1994, just months into the original Broadway run of playwright Tony Kushner’s watershed spiritual, psychological and political response to the age of AIDS (Full title: Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes).
The actor that Harrison saw in the role of Prior Walter — a young man with AIDS who is abandoned by his seronegative lover — was played by Stephen Spinella, a grad school collaborator of Kushner’s for whom the part was custom tailored. Spinella went on to win Tony awards for his performances in both of the play’s parts, Millenium Approaches and Perestroika (Different opening dates for the two, which ultimately ran in repertory, allowed Angels to be up for awards in both the 1993 and 1994 theater seasons).
Later this month, a much anticipated new production of Angels will open at the Berkeley Rep. Randy Harrison will play Prior Walter. And Stephen…
