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“You fool!” John Glover barks at a waiter who has just brought the wrong bowl of soup to the corner table of a Los Feliz restaurant. The waiter corrects his mistake and walks abruptly away, prompting Glover to call after him, “You knew I was kidding, right?”
Then, the aside: “I’ve always wanted to say that to a waiter. They do it in movies all the time.”
Would this be the same man tagged by critic Pauline Kael as “the prime rotter” of ‘80s cinema, the actor who played an asp-tongued misanthrope in “Love! Valour! Compassion!,” who’s embodied countless brands of televised villainy, and who got his big break in movies as the cad who shot Ann Margaret full of heroin in “52 Pick Up?” That (ital) John Glover feels compelled to retract an insult?
The one and the same.
This kinder, gentler Glover is entirely in keeping with his latest character, Joe, the barfly with a heart of gold at the center of William Saroyan’s 1939 play “The Time of Your Life.”
As star of the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, running through December 9 at the Skylight Theater, Glover earns exactly $12 per show. “It’s for art,” Glover explains. “I want to keep -- this seems so corny -- I want to keep growing as an artist. Here I have a chance to play this strange mystic kind of puzzle. I mean who is this man? There aren’t a lot of clues given. I think he was a killer businessman. I think he really destroyed lives in quest for success, which is why he gives it all up and kind of throws his money at people. I think he’s got big problems and is trying to make up for his past sins. If I’d been playing him 20 years ago. I’m sure there’s a way to play Joe in time of your life where he’s already got all the answers and he just sort of spouts what he’s found out. But I see it as a journey that he’s on, trying to discover what’s happening.”
“Time of Your Life” director Gene Reynolds says, ”Glover has ideas, he takes a position. We had some enthusiastic agreements, and other times, disagreements. Glover’s work is very complex, and full of surprises. To play Joe, you need a character that’s bigger than life, with a real personality because Joe is the editorial voice of Saroyan, and Saroyan was talking about the renunciation of competition and stress and the triviality that wears us all down.”
Saroyan’s “voice” took on heightened relevance midway through the cast’s “Time of Your Life” preparations. Says Glover, “We started rehearsing in August and in the middle of it, one morning, September 11 happened, and the play took on all kinds of new tones.”
“The Time of Your Life” lends itself to a sense of global crisis. It was written during six frenzied days immediately after Nazi Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in September of 1939. Glover, wire-rim glasses perched on his nose, says “Eddie Dowling, who played Joe, got Saroyan to write it. Saroyan went into a hotel and wrote it in October and he and Dowling directed it together in November. So I think ‘The Time of Your Life’ was a piece these guys wanted to do because of what was happening in the world and they wanted to make people laugh, and make them think.
“It’s a bizarre play, with not a lot of answers given, at all. It’s chaos. just chaos. Everywhere. I think it was Saroyan’s and Eddie’s joke on people who were going to do the play: we’ll just let them figure it out themselves. It’s like very early theater of the absurd. And I’m meant to be this guy who’s sort of like a magician who’s creating it all, like Prospero.”
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As an only child infatuated with movies about “backstage” Broadway, Glover grew up in a small Maryland town where show business was not considered a serious career option. “In high school they had all those future clubs,” he recalls. “I knew I wasn’t going to be a nurse in Future Nurses of America. I didn’t want to be a farmer in the FFA and didn’t want to be a home maker in the FHA. So I went and joined the FTA - Future Teachers of America.” Just one problem. “I was terrified of being a teacher,” admits Glover. “To stand in front of a classroom, the responsibility is boggling. Imagine! Standing in front of people!”
Isn’t that what he does for a living?
“Yeah,” Glover replies, “but acting’s different. It’s not me, it’s somebody else. I’m telling stories.”
While attending Towson State Teachers College [ED: now called Towson University] in Baltimore, Glover spent summers as an apprentice at The Barter Theater in rural Virginia, founded during the depression by an out-of-work actor named Robert Porterfield. “People would come with their hens and hams and chickens and eggs and things and they would pay with that,” says Glover. “Mr. Porterfield was this big old southern man who had this shocking big head of white hair, and he used to tell us” Glover suddenly assumes a cornpone accent: ‘We didn’t earn any money that summer, but we all gained a lot of weight,’ Glover laughs. “He was great.”
After three seasons at Barter, Glover abandoned his half-hearted teaching aspirations and moved in 1966 to New York. With his patrician nose, sculpted cheekbones, wavy brown hair, emotive hands and natural flair, the lean actor found work quickly and took just about every job he was offered. “I guess that’s a flaw in my career, that I like to work too much,” he concedes. “I just kept taking jobs. I’d have agents who’d say. you can’t go out of town anymore, you have to stay in New York,’ but then I’d get offered some part at some regional theater and go do it. And now I’ve had agents say, ‘We don’t want you doing TV, just movies.’ But I just like to work.”
In 1986 Glover found a mid-career niche for himself when he portrayed a sadistic heel in John Frankenheimer’s “52 Pick Up.” Says Glover, “I played Alan Raimy, who was just the worst, amoral, despicable, fun-loving guy in the world. Ann Margaret was in the movie, and I was so excited. I loved her so much.” But the actress was creeped out by Glover, he recalls “At one point in the movie, I kidnap Ann Margaret, throw her into the trunk of my car, take her to some horrible motel, shoot her full of heroin, have my way with her and film it -- and she didn’t like to hang out with me on the set at all after that.”
More villains followed including manic tycoon Daniel Clamp in the 1990 film “Gremlins 2” and a conniving rake in the 1987 TV miniseries “Nutcracker: Money, Madness and Murder” for which he received an Emmy nomination. “They were like a pack of thieves, in ‘Nutcracker,’” Glover remembers fondly. “All those villains are so fun to play -- they Fantastics -- you know, in Commedia dell'Arte, the characters who are larger than life, like Sir Toby in ‘Twelfth Night’ I’ve always been attracted to that. It’s got to be heightened doesn’t it? People don’t want to just see you sitting around like I am right now, do they?”
Oddly, Glover credits Doris Day as a touchstone for his as over-the-top bad guys. “I think it’s because I loved Doris Day as a child, so there’s the joi (ital) element, her joy of life. I don’t know how conscious it was, but I just transferred that joy of life over (into the roles).
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A few years after buying a Silver Lake home and settling in Los Angeles, Glover was offered the role of a lifetime. Actually, two roles. In “Love! Valour! Compassion!,” Terrence McNally’s play about six gay men who struggle with relationships, AIDS and mortality over the course of three summer weekends in the country, Glover played the bitter John and his gentle, loving twin brother James, earning a 1985 Tony Award in the process.
“That was like a dream, an actor’s dream,” says Glover. “In September, Terrence came into my dressing room at the Mark Taper while we were rehearsing his play ‘Lips Together, Teeth Apart’ and said ‘I’ve started writing a part for this new play and I’m hearing your voice.’ Then around Christmas time, this huge script came, like this four-hour thing” -- he holds his slender fingers three inches apart -- “and Terrence said ‘look at the twins.’”
“So I read this thing, which seemed impossible to do.” Glover recalls, “I knew that one was terrified of people and wanted to be loved so badly that it tied him in knots and the other one just loved, so he didn’t worry about anything and was just able to be himself. That was the gist of it, and that started dictating behavior. One guy just came on and had fun with the other people and the other guy was so worried about what people thought of him.”
What devices did he rely on during performance to get into character for such contrary personalities? Glover giggles, “The device was to get my clothes changed as soon as possible and get back on stage.”
The bittersweet drama rewarded Glover with one of his most memorable stage moments. “I remember one night, I got to the end of this chair scene where the tied up brother was trying to tell his brother how sorry he was, and I just heard this sob come from the back of the theater. and it was just somebody, urrggh, I thought, if nothing else, that was enough, to know that I’d gone down into somebody’s soul and touched somebody in such a way that released this (response)”
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Matters of the soul have been on Glover’s mind lately. His mother died three years ago, and his father is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. The actor flies to Maryland every week to spend time with him.
So Glover finds much to relate to in his next role. He’ll play the ghost of a poet looking back over his life in Athol Fugard’s new play “Sorrows and Rejoicings,” which opens at New York’s Second Stage theater in January before transferring to the Mark Taper Forum next May.
The playwright directed Glover when “Sorrows” premiered earlier this year at Princeton University’s McCarter Theater. Says Fugard, “The craft aspect of what John does -- his sense of timing, his sense of language, the sense of the emotional journey in a scene or the emotional content of a moment, all of those are of an incredibly finely developed degree. But John also is prepared to be emotionally naked on the stage in a way that very few actors I’ve worked with have shown. When I worked with Ben Kingsley on the stage, he had that quality as well. John is prepared to stake every fiber of his being on that stage. And he has phenomenal range, to make people laugh, cry, to frighten them -- it’s all there.”
“It” may, in fact, all be there in Glover’s repertoire of talents, but he still feels there’s room for improvement. So Glover is taking acting lessons.
“Is that funny? Why is that funny?” wonders Glover. Well, surprising, maybe, that an actor with a Tony award, five Emmy nominations, 75 films and TV movies and four dozen plays to his credit still finds himself fretting about creative deficiencies.
But at age 57, Glover wants to peel back a few layers of technique and tap into the “life lessons” he’s recently been faced with. Since May he’s been studying with Milton Katselas at the Beverly Hills Playhouse. Katselas’ Camelot Productions is staging “The Time of Your Life.”
Says Glover, “The power that an artist can have to move people, to think about something, I just want to equip myself better with those kind of skills. It gets frightening sometimes. I see myself as a character actor, not as a leading actor, and in something like ‘Time of Your Life’ I’m being asked to strengthen my chops and take some responsibilities. There’s some kind of deepening that needs to be done.”
Not that his campy villains will be tossed in the heap. Glover has a recurring role as the gleefully evil father of Lex Luthor in The WB’s young Superman series “Smallville.” But Glover now sees himself on a path of sorts.
“The things that I’m finding out from ‘Time of Your Life’ are themes that have to do with what Athol’s dealing with in ‘Sorrows and Rejoicings,’ and it’s the thing I’m looking at in Richard II, which I’m studying in class right now. There’s his speech just before the people come in to kill him: ‘I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.’ Or look at that horse that wins the race in Time of Your Life that Joe’s friend wants to bet on. Saroyan calls it Precious Time.
“And I didn’t understand all these themes when I was young because then, we had all the time in the world.”