Face to Face with John Glover Playing with the Audience in 'The Paris Letter' d Backstage.Com July 28, 2005 By Simi Horwitz Photo By: The WB/Timothy White

"I want to make Lionel real. He's not just a villain," says the strikingly good-looking 60-year-old Kingston, N.Y., native, who meets me in a lounge at Roundabout Theatre Company's Laura Pels Theatre, where "The Paris Letter" will be playing through Aug. 7.

"I love it when people stop me on the street and say, 'Is Lionel a good guy or a bad guy? I can't tell.' " That said, Glover admits that Lionel has gotten a tad too benign in recent months: "I'd like to see him nasty again, kinky."

In "The Paris Letter," Anton is arguably nasty and perhaps even kinky. But he is also relentlessly charming as he interacts with Sandy (Ron Rifkin), a former lover, and Katie (Michele Pawk), his closest friend and now Sandy's wife. Anton also manages to seduce the audience with his ironic asides and commentary while narrating a story that spans 40 years in the lives of the protagonists.

"My goal was to make Anton real and form a bond with the audience," Glover notes. "I did that in 'Love! Valour! Compassion!' and director Doug Hughes, with whom I had never worked before, wanted someone who could play with an audience. I enjoy that.

"I see Anton as a combination of Roddy McDowall and Kenneth Tynan," he continues. "Like Roddy, Anton is a kind of cheerleader, a spiritual fluffer, who makes it possible for other people to do what they have to do. And like Kenneth Tynan, Anton is an intellectual with a sharp wit and a kink."

Anton is largely a foil to Sandy, a tortured middle-aged man who is still conflicted over his homosexuality in general and his ongoing love for Anton in particular. Glover concedes that parts of Anton are difficult for him to grasp -- specifically, a man who takes no responsibility for his actions as he enables his closest friends to persist in their self-destructive, inauthentic lives.

As Glover describes him, Anton is a man in denial -- about virtually everything, including his own desperate loneliness, which he camouflages with promiscuous sexual encounters.

By contrast, the Los Angeles-based Glover has had one partner, sculptor Adam Kurtzman, for 12 years. And unlike the totally narcissistic Anton, Glover has many real concerns outside his own self-interest. He agonizes, for example, over his moral obligations to a friend who is harming himself. He wonders when interference, however well-intentioned, is benign and when it's simply interference.

And there are the charitable activities that distinguish Glover from the socially indifferent Anton. Glover's father, a traveling salesman, died of Alzheimer's disease three years ago, and the actor is deeply committed to -- indeed, an outspoken activist on behalf of -- the Alzheimer's Association.

"It was terrible to watch my father watching himself lose his memory," he recalls. "This was a man who had previously remembered everything. And we were all covering for him, pretending it wasn't happening. It was total denial." He acknowledges that his high-profile role on "Smallville" has given him a platform to discuss the disease and generate interest.

A Rapist's Eyes

Glover has enjoyed an illustrious career on both coasts. In addition to earning five Emmy nominations for television roles, he walked off with Tony and Obie awards for his performance in "Love! Valour! Compassion!" Other Broadway credits include "Design for Living," "The Importance of Being Earnest," "The Visit," and "The Great God Brown," for which he received a Drama Desk Award. In 1975 he won the St. Clair Bayfield Award for best Shakespearean performance for "The Winter's Tale." Among his film credits are "52 Pick-Up," "White Nights," "The Incredible Shrinking Woman," "Melvin and Howard," "Julia," and "Annie Hall."

Glover has come a long way from his early days in New York, when he served as an usher at The Kitchen under the jurisdiction of the colorful Sylvia Miles. "She scared the shit out of me," Glover laughs. "One day she looked at me intently and said" -- he mimics a whiny Bronx voice -- " 'You've got rapist's eyes.' I never forgot that."

Growing up on Maryland's Eastern Shore, Glover did not have his sights set on an acting career: "I just never thought I could make a living as an actor." Instead he planned to teach, graduating from Teachers College at Towson State University in Maryland. But after a summer at Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Va., Glover decided to give acting a shot.

He arrived in New York City in 1966 and within short order was acting in children's theatre and at regional theatres outside the city -- Long Wharf, Hartford Stage, and Yale Rep, among others. Glover honed his craft and ultimately gained Equity membership. To this day he is an advocate of working in regional theatres as a career path.

He acknowledges, however, that it might have been easier years ago for an unknown actor, without representation, to work in some of those better-known regional theatres. Glover did not have an agent at that early stage of his career, and the lack did not stand in his way.

But then, it's much more difficult in general to make a go of it as an actor today: "For my first apartment on East 74th Street, I paid $69 a month," he notes. "It was a seventh floor walk-up, but I could live in Manhattan. Now it would have to be Queens or New Jersey or somewhere else."

And the competition is keener than ever. Thanks to "Entertainment Tonight" and other shows of that ilk, Glover says, more people are launching careers in entertainment and pouring into the profession. "Now everybody knows about weekly movie grosses and what actors do to create the characters they play," he observes. "They feel they can be rich and famous at 18. And some are. When I go back to Towson once or twice a year to work with acting students, that's what they're talking about -- going to L.A. I wanted to come to New York."

Looking back at his career, Glover suggests that playing the twins, John and James, in "Love! Valour! Compassion!" was a high point, especially since playwright Terrence McNally told him that "when he wrote the characters, he heard my voice."

But Glover's most daunting role was in Jean-Claude van Itallie's "The Traveler," in which he played a character who had suffered a stroke and whose language was altered to the point of incomprehensibility.

"I felt that there was no way I could play this part," he says. "But as I got into it, I began to understand the language. And when I called for a line which I had forgotten, the stage manager thought I was crazy because it all sounded like gibberish to him. To me the words suddenly made sense. I had found the language."

Glover has surely found the language -- literal and metaphorical -- in "The Paris Letter," and he is optimistic that audiences leave the theatre mindful of the play's themes: "Denial, responsibility, and the fact that one's choices have consequences."

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