Joe Mantello’s Many Choices

Joe Mantello, who plays Louis Ironson in the Mark Taper Forum’s current production of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” has been thinking about choices lately.

For Mantello, what makes his character timely and intriguing are the choices he makes: Louis, a gay, Jewish word processor, leaves his lover, Prior, who is dying of AIDS, and starts a relationship with a married Mormon lawyer.

Mantello was quoted in Interview magazine as saying that leaving Prior makes Louis a completely loathsome character. “That wasn’t what I said, and I apologized to Tony (Kushner) for something like that being printed. Louis isn’t a complete jerk, it’s just that he isn’t noble.”

Kushner thought of Mantello for the role of Louis after seeing his performance in Paula Vogel’s “The Baltimore Waltz” at the Circle Repertory Company in New York. “There hadn’t been a gay actor in the role before, and they were interested in seeing what happened when there was.”

Mantello, 29, has been working steadily as an actor and director in New York for the past five years and has appeared on television in “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd” and “Law & Order.”

Between the Los Angeles run of Kushner’s seven-hour epic and its opening at the New York Shakespeare Festival public theater in February, Mantello will direct “Three Hotels,” a new play by his lover, Jon Robin Baitz, for New York’s Circle Rep.