Stephen Spinella on Love, Survival & Miraculous Humanity of JEROME

For more than three decades, Stephen Spinella has been one of the defining voices of queer theater. From his Tony Award-winning performance as Prior Walter in the original Broadway run of ANGELS IN AMERICA to countless acclaimed stage performances since, Spinella has helped tell stories that have shaped how audiences understand queer lives and experiences.

Now, he’s starring in John J. Caswell Jr.’s JEROME at Playwrights Horizons, a remarkable new play that follows Con (short for Cornelius) and Doane, a longtime couple living in the Arizona desert, whose lives are transformed by the arrival of a younger man named Bruin. Set between 1992 and 1994, the play exists in the shadow of the AIDS crisis without being defined by it. Instead the remarkable piece explores love, companionship, mortality, and the complicated ways people find one another.

For Spinella, the appeal of the project was immediate. “At this point it was a part I could play and it was a good part,” he says with a laugh. “As Eve Harrington would say, ‘I’d do much more for a part that good.’” [And, if you don’t get Spinella’s All About Eve reference, please make a viewing of the classic 1950 film a priority.]

 But it was Caswell’s writing that truly hooked him. “It’s just a freaking brilliant play, with a gorgeous series of events,” Spinella states. “And the characters are exquisitely drawn. John’s dialogue is completely sui generis. Nobody writes dialogue quite like that.”

While audiences may inevitably connect JEROME to earlier works about the AIDS epidemic, Spinella sees the play through a different lens. “I think of things more about how honest I feel like the play is about what it feels like to be a gay person,” he explains. And that authenticity is particularly evident in the play’s exploration of how queer relationships form and evolve. 

Spinella points to the way the play begins with sex but gradually reveals something deeper. “The first four scenes in this play are about them having sex. It’s about getting the situation aligned in such a way that these three guys have sex,” he says. “But after they have sex, you actually watch them sort of fall in love.”

For Spinella, that emotional progression is one of the play’s most groundbreaking achievements. “There is a kind of a camaraderie that happens there that develops into real love between the three of them,” he reveals. “And I have never seen that in a gay play,” he adds. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen this in a straight story.”

What emerges is a story that feels both deeply specific and surprisingly universal. “There’s this completely amazing miracle where they meet this man who is not that far off in age from them, who has just been broken by the world,” Spinella explains. “I think these two men, they created this refuge in the side of this mountain where this other man can begin to feel some joy, connection, have a life, and even breathe a little bit.”

The play’s explorations of queer aging make room for Spinella’s reflections to become more personal. Having lived through the AIDS crisis and the homophobia of the 1980s and 1990s, he recognizes much of his own experience in Con’s story. “It feels like my life,” he emphasizes. “It just feels like my life.”

Spinella remembers being active in ACT UP before moving into ANGELS IN AMERICA and navigating an industry that was often hostile toward openly gay performers. “I lived through the homophobic s__t of the early ’90s,” he recalls. “I was one of the first [openly gay] performers ever to thank their spouse at a national award show in history” he mentions in regards to thanking his then-partner, Peter Elliott, at the Tony Awards in 1993. Producer John Glines was the first person to openly thank a same-sex partner on a nationally broadcast awards show when his play, TORCH SONG TRILOGY, won Best Play a decade earlier in 1983.

Despite its setting, JEROME is not a story trapped in grief. Instead, it finds humor, tenderness, and joy amid difficult realities. That balance is part of what makes playing Con so rewarding for Spinella. “We don’t carry our grief on our sleeve at every moment,” Spinella says. “His [Con’s] grief is not so much grief as it’s terror,” he elucidates. “He’s terrified of dying.”

Rather than forcing those emotions to dominate every scene, Caswell allows them to surface organically. “He [Caswell] doesn’t write the terror on his sleeve,” Spinella explains. “He lets the terror bubble up, and then he gives Con all of these mechanisms to deal with it.”

That approach allows the play’s comedy to land with even greater force. “The audience just has such a great time,” Spinella says. “There are these crazy moments, like in the middle of the saddest heartbreaking scene, where Caswell drops a bomb, like a nuclear bomb joke, that just kills the audience. It just kills them!”

The result is a theatrical experience that feels remarkably alive. “It’s one of those plays that gives you [the actor] more than it takes from you,” Spinella reveals. “There are plays that cost you a lot, and they don’t feed you very much. This play, I think, ‘Oh my God, we get to do it again.’ It just fills you, and fills you, and fills you again, and again.”

That sense of vitality extends to the play’s representation of queer relationships and chosen family. “I think people are drawn to stories that they understand but they’ve never seen before,” Spinella posits. “And I have never seen anything like this.” And, for what it’s worth, I also have never seen anything like this either.

Importantly, JEROME contributes to the ongoing evolution of queer storytelling as well. Not because of its subject matter, but because of its unflinching humanity. “It creates real people,” Spinella says. “That’s the genius of ANGELS too. It creates real people.”

For Spinella, that’s ultimately what makes JEROME so special. “It’s trying to do something that is actually happening, and it makes a representation of it that is true,” he notes.

“It’s one of the most beautiful, profound plays I’ve done in my career,” he adds. “Honestly, second only to ANGLES. I think it’s one of the most astonishing pieces of writing since ANGELS.” For audiences lucky enough to experience JEROME during its current run, that praise may feel entirely earned.