Arts & Entertainment
Maintaining mystery
Out actor Spinella says ‘Velocity’ better experienced blind
Estelle Parsons as Alexandra and Stephen Spinella as Chris in “The Velocity of Autumn’ at Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater. It runs through Oct. 20. (Photo by Teresa Wood; courtesy Arena)
‘The Velocity of Autumn’
Through Oct. 20
Arena Stage
1101 Sixth Street, SW
$40-90
Arenastage.org
Broadway star Stephen Spinella almost never leaves New York City to work.
“I’ll only go for incredibly special situations,” he says. “I love my apartment. I have a great support system of friends. I’m just not a happy camper outside of New York. It’s got to be something really great to tempt me.”
Playing opposite Academy Award-winning actress Estelle Parsons in Arena Stage’s “The Velocity of Autumn” is one of those impossible-to-refuse situations.
“Last winter I got a call from Molly Smith [Arena’s artistic director and ‘Velocity’s’ director] offering me the job,” says Spinella, who is gay. “I asked why they’d reached out to me. Molly said I was Parsons’ first choice to play her son. You don’t say no to that.”
Penned by Cleveland-based playwright Eric Coble, the two-character play focuses on 79-year-old Alexandra, who is experiencing the early signs of dementia. Holed up in her Brooklyn brownstone with a cache of homemade explosives, she threatens to blow up the house and herself rather than rethink a less independent living arrangement. It’s then that her estranged gay son Chris is brought in to mediate.
Spinella, widely known for his brilliant Tony Award-winning performances as Prior Walter (a gay man with AIDS) in “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches” and “Angels in America: Perestroika,” won’t reveal much — he believes an audience should experience a play blind. But he will say that in 90 uninterrupted minutes, Chris and Alexandra must find out where they’ve been, where they are now and how they’re going to resolve her issues. It’s a lot to cover.
In real life, Spinella’s 90-year-old mother suffers from dementia. She lives in a care facility in Arizona. But unlike his mother, says Spinella, “Alexandra is still very alert and aware. She’s an artist and very self-reliant. Her character is processing what is happening to her and what she wants to do. That’s a big part of what the play is about.”
And while we’re told Spinella’s character is gay, it’s mentioned rather offhandedly. The straight playwright Coble, says he was intrigued with the idea of Chris’ sexuality not being the focal point.
“So often when being gay is used as a dramatic device it’s the entire focus of the character,” Coble says. “I wanted to write a character who’s not struggling with his sexuality. There are other reasons why he needed to get out of New York City and live far from his mother and more conventionally successful siblings.”
Spinella concurs: “The fact that he’s gay is almost completely unimportant to the play. It’s a minor revelation. When he left home, it was probably more important but it’s essentially dissolved in the way that it has for so many of us in this country.”
For Coble, having Parsons (who won her Oscar for “Bonnie and Clyde” and hilariously played Bev on “Roseanne” for a decade) and Spinella bring his characters to life has been a joy and slightly unnerving. “They’re so good and so smart,” he says. “Their ‘truthometers’ are very high — they have a way at getting at the kernel of truth in every moment. It’s an incredible thing to see and experience.”
And Spinella is rhapsodic about 85-year-old Parsons: “She has that frank New England aspect. It’s great for the character. She’s always surprising — incredibly smart and sensitive with a steel trap mind. She and her husband Peter are both like jocks. They cycle, walk, swim and hike. They’re also fun — really wonderful people.”
Next year, Spinella can be seen HBO’s movie version of Larry Kramer’s seminal AIDS play “The Normal Heart.” He describes the experience as fantastic and intense. His part (Sanford) is small but important. “Early in the play his KS lesions are revealed in the doctor’s office,” says Spinella. “And later, in a newly added scene set in a hospital, he is wild with dementia, calling for his dog. He totally loses it and falls apart.”
But for today, Spinella is happily immersed in “Velocity.” When the show closes next month, he returns to New York City, that place he hates to leave.
The 44th annual Queen of Hearts pageant was held at The Lodge in Boonsboro, Md. on Friday, Feb. 20. Six contestants vied for the title and Bev was crowned the winner.
(Washington Blade photos by Michael Key)
View on Threads
Books
New book profiles LGBTQ Ukrainians, documents war experiences
Tuesday marks four years since Russia attacked Ukraine
Journalist J. Lester Feder’s new book profiles LGBTQ Ukrainians and their experiences during Russia’s war against their country.
Feder for “The Queer Face of War: Portraits and Stories from Ukraine” interviewed and photographed LGBTQ Ukrainians in Kyiv, the country’s capital, and in other cities. They include Olena Hloba, the co-founder of Tergo, a support group for parents and friends of LGBTQ Ukrainians, who fled her home in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha shortly after Russia launched its war on Feb. 24, 2022.
Russian soldiers killed civilians as they withdrew from Bucha. Videos and photographs that emerged from the Kyiv suburb showed dead bodies with their hands tied behind their back and other signs of torture.
Olena Shevchenko, chair of Insight, a Ukrainian LGBTQ rights group, wrote the book’s forward.
The book also profiles Viktor Pylypenko, a gay man who the Ukrainian military assigned to the 72nd Mechanized Black Cossack Brigade after the war began. Feder writes Pylypenko’s unit “was deployed to some of the fiercest and most important battles of the war.”
“The brigade was pivotal to beating Russian forces back from Kyiv in their initial attempt to take the capital, helping them liberate territory near Kharkiv and defending the front lines in Donbas,” wrote Feder.
Pylypenko spent two years fighting “on Ukraine’s most dangerous battlefields, serving primarily as a medic.”
“At times he felt he was living in a horror movie, watching tank shells tear his fellow soldiers apart before his eyes,” wrote Feder. “He held many men as they took their final breaths. Of the roughly one hundred who entered the unit with him, only six remained when he was discharged in 2024. He didn’t leave by choice: he went home to take care of his father, who had suffered a stroke.”
Feder notes one of Pylypenko’s former commanders attacked him online when he came out. Pylypenko said another commander defended him.
Feder also profiled Diana and Oleksii Polukhin, two residents of Kherson, a port city in southern Ukraine that is near the mouth of the Dnieper River.
Ukrainian forces regained control of Kherson in November 2022, nine months after Russia occupied it.
Diana, a cigarette vender, and Polukhin told Feder that Russian forces demanded they disclose the names of other LGBTQ Ukrainians in Kherson. Russian forces also tortured Diana and Polukhin while in their custody.
Polukhim is the first LGBTQ victim of Russian persecution to report their case to Ukrainian prosecutors.
Feder, who is of Ukrainian descent, first visited Ukraine in 2013 when he wrote for BuzzFeed.
He was Outright International’s Senior Fellow for Emergency Research from 2021-2023. Feder last traveled to Ukraine in December 2024.
Feder spoke about his book at Politics and Prose at the Wharf in Southwest D.C. on Feb. 6. The Washington Blade spoke with Feder on Feb. 20.
Feder told the Blade he began to work on the book when he was at Outright International and working with humanitarian groups on how to better serve LGBTQ Ukrainians. Feder said military service requirements, a lack of access to hormone therapy and documents that accurately reflect a person’s gender identity and LGBTQ-friendly shelters are among the myriad challenges that LGBTQ Ukrainians have faced since the war began.
“All of these were components of a queer experience of war that was not well documented, and we had never seen in one place, especially with photos,” he told the Blade. “I felt really called to do that, not only because of what was happening in Ukraine, but also as a way to bring to the surface issues that we’d had seen in Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan.”
Feder also spoke with the Blade about the war’s geopolitical implications.
Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2013 signed a law that bans the “promotion of homosexuality” to minors.
The 2014 Winter Olympics took place in Sochi, a Russian resort city on the Black Sea. Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine a few weeks after the games ended.
Russia’s anti-LGBTQ crackdown has continued over the last decade.
The Russian Supreme Court in 2023 ruled the “international LGBT movement” is an extremist organization and banned it. The Russian Justice Ministry last month designated ILGA World, a global LGBTQ and intersex rights group, as an “undesirable” organization.
Ukraine, meanwhile, has sought to align itself with Europe.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy after a 2021 meeting with then-President Joe Biden at the White House said his country would continue to fight discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. (Zelenskyy’s relationship with the U.S. has grown more tense since the Trump-Vance administration took office.) Zelenskyy in 2022 publicly backed civil partnerships for same-sex couples.
Then-Ukrainian Ambassador to the U.S. Oksana Markarova in 2023 applauded Kyiv Pride and other LGBTQ and intersex rights groups in her country when she spoke at a photo exhibit at Ukraine House in D.C. that highlighted LGBTQ and intersex soldiers. Then-Kyiv Pride Executive Director Lenny Emson, who Feder profiles in his book, was among those who attended the event.
“Thank you for everything you do in Kyiv, and thank you for everything that you do in order to fight the discrimination that still is somewhere in Ukraine,” said Markarova. “Not everything is perfect yet, but you know, I think we are moving in the right direction. And we together will not only fight the external enemy, but also will see equality.”
Feder in response to the Blade’s question about why he decided to write his book said he “didn’t feel” the “significance of Russia’s war against Ukraine” for LGBTQ people around the world “was fully understood.”
“This was an opportunity to tell that big story,” he said.
“The crackdown on LGBT rights inside Russia was essentially a laboratory for a strategy of attacking democratic values by attacking queer rights and it was one as Ukraine was getting closet to Europe back in 2013, 2014,” he added. “It was a strategy they were using as part of their foreign policy, and it was one they were using not only in Ukraine over the past decade, but around the world.”
Feder said Republicans are using “that same strategy to attack queer people, to attack democracy itself.”
“I felt like it was important that Americans understand that history,” he said.
More than a dozen LGBTQ athletes won medals at the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics that ended on Sunday.
Cayla Barnes, Hilary Knight, and Alex Carpenter are LGBTQ members of the U.S. women’s hockey team that won a gold medal after they defeated Canada in overtime. Knight the day before the Feb. 19 match proposed to her girlfriend, Brittany Bowe, an Olympic speed skater.
French ice dancer Guillaume Cizeron, who is gay, and his partner Laurence Fournier Beaudry won gold. American alpine skier Breezy Johnson, who is bisexual, won gold in the women’s downhill. Amber Glenn, who identifies as bisexual and pansexual, was part of the American figure skating team that won gold in the team event.
Swiss freestyle skier Mathilde Gremaud, who is in a relationship with Vali Höll, an Austrian mountain biker, won gold in women’s freeski slopestyle.
Bruce Mouat, who is the captain of the British curling team that won a silver medal, is gay. Six members of the Canadian women’s hockey team — Emily Clark, Erin Ambrose, Emerance Maschmeyer, Brianne Jenner, Laura Stacey, and Marie-Philip Poulin — that won silver are LGBTQ.
Swedish freestyle skier Sandra Naeslund, who is a lesbian, won a bronze medal in ski cross.
Belgian speed skater Tineke den Dulk, who is bisexual, was part of her country’s mixed 2000-meter relay that won bronze. Canadian ice dancer Paul Poirier, who is gay, and his partner, Piper Gilles, won bronze.
Laura Zimmermann, who is queer, is a member of the Swiss women’s hockey team that won bronze when they defeated Sweden.
Outsports.com notes all of the LGBTQ Olympians who competed at the games and who medaled.
The global cost of Trump’s foreign aid ideology
Two very different views of the State of the Union
Va. activists preparing campaign in support of repealing marriage amendment
PHOTOS: Queen of Hearts
New book profiles LGBTQ Ukrainians, documents war experiences
D.C. police arrest man for burglary at gay bar Spark Social House
PHOTOS: Cupid’s Undie Run
Going for gold: Ford Bronco Sport vs. Toyota RAV4
US Embassy in Mexico issues shelter in place order for Puerto Vallarta
