Photo Op: Getting Lucky with Waiting for Godot's John Glover
Broadway.Com
May 26, 2009
Photos by Jenny Anderson
Text by Kimberly Kaye
In 1966, John Glover did what most aspiring actors do: scrounged together some cash and moved to New York City. It was a different town then. Glover’s first apartment, a sprawling loft in TriBeCa (“before it was called TriBeCa”), cost $400 a month. The actor could nab orchestra seats on Broadway for just $7.50. There were no reality TV stars, no bullet trains to success, just work—and Glover, along with a generation of future stars including Meryl Streep, Patti LuPone, Tovah Feldshuh and Glover’s current co-star, John Goodman, did it, scraping by on paltry wages. During this time, Glover played Estragon in a tiny regional production of Waiting for Godot, the tragicomic Beckett piece that totally befuddled Glover. “I had no idea what it was about,” he says sitting in his Studio 54 dressing room, where the Roundabout Theatre Company’s Broadway revival of the show has earned Glover, already a Tony winner, another nomination for his portrayal of Lucky. “I didn’t know anything. But I’ve looked at life from both sides now.”
He smiles and sings a few lines from Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now,” a characteristically playful moment from a man known for playing a ruthless villain on TV's Smallville. He stops singing and returns to the subject of Godot: “Pozzo says in the show ‘They give birth astride the grave.’ It’s a frightening notion—you see your parents go, then you see you’re next in line. When I was 21 doing the show, I was eternal. Now I’m about to turn 65, and both my parents are gone. I didn’t understand until recently the play is about living, and what we do with our fear, our hope.” He goes quiet for a moment. “It’s just a great play.”
Glover admits two-show days are daunting: “I woke up this morning
and thought, ‘How am I going to do two shows today?’
We’re all exhausted, but it’s exhilarating.”
Glover’s dressing room is sparse but inviting. Flowers from pals like Oscar nominee Carol Kane sit on the widow. A bottle of champagne waits on the floor for a special occasion.
The actor normally has a thick head of dark hair. “I decided it would
look less like a wig if I just shaved my head. And I’ve been told I
have a great head,” he jokes cheekily.
The actor displays two photos of his father: one as a young man
(with a young John on his shoulders), and another at age 88, taken by his son two weeks before he died.
The only other pictures on the mirror are of a suitably Godot-inspired skull, and one of the show’s playwright himself. “I was never a huge Beckett fan,” Glover says.
In Glover’s script, Lucky’s three-page monologue is covered with handwritten notes. “I sat at my kitchen table for three hours every day and just tried to figure out what it meant.”
“I love the name of this,” says the actor, unscrewing the lid on a pot of pancake makeup and spreading it over his face. “It’s called ‘Death Flesh.’ Really, that’s the name.”
Glover applies his own makeup nightly, adding wrinkles, dirt, blood and bruises to Lucky’s pallor and stringy hair to create the abused character that enters looking close to death.
“I like to add a little green to my makeup. Green is such a deadly color. It’s appropriate for Lucky.”
Glover’s Lucky foams at the mouth onstage. “My inspiration for the
drooling was an actress named Woodwyn Koonz. I did Give Me Your Answer Do” with her…”
“…she would sit and drool in the show. I haven’t seen her since that production, but I’ve got to find her and tell her she was my inspiration.”
“I was terrified,” Glover explains of his initial reaction to replacing injured cast member David Strathairn in Godot. “My agent said I’d be a fool not to do the show, so I had to.”
“People always ask if these are my real eyebrows,” the performer says while brushing each brow with white mascara. “And yes, they are all mine.”
In makeup, the usually mellow Glover looks more like the villains he’s played on TV and film. “Oh, I love playing a villain. They’re devious, complex and always fun.”
Glover begins to apply Lucky’s deep wound from the rope tied around his character’s neck. “Don’t worry, the rope only looks painful. That’s the magic of theater, my dear.”
He finishes in the show’s wig room, finessing the makeup with a grotesque scab. “I used to forget to put them on, so now they write notes to remind me to do it, and the runny nose.”
Glover steals a rare moment for a cup of tea (Throat Coat, to protect his voice). The self-proclaimed homebody also knits scarves—and scarves only—during downtime.
While his wig goes on, Glover recounts the recent night an audience
member vocalized his opinion mid-performance. “He started screaming, ‘Get me out of here!’”
Already a Tony winner, Glover takes his current nomination for Featured Actor in stride. “If you can just be happy doing the work, you can have a career.”
“It’s awfully nice to look good and win prizes,” he continues. “I’ve been seduced by all that before. But I’m an old man now and know better.”
Sipping tea, Glover confesses another source of inspiration for his Lucky: “My old dog, Aldo. He was terrier mix, part pit bull. There’s a lot of Aldo in Lucky.”
As he limbers up pre-show, Glover recalls Studio 54’s famous heyday. “I was always afraid I’d be denied entrance to the club and my ego wouldn’t recover, so I never went.”
“The Roundabout Theatre people used to have meetings down here,” he says,
gesturing around the basement. “They said rats would just walk out and join them.”
“The death makeover continues,” Glover jokes, adding the finishing touch to his face: a mouthful of rotting teeth.
Glover ties ankle weights under his costume to add to Lucky’s exhausted, weighed down appearance.
The man is transformed on the outside, but the essence of John Glover shines through regardless. “People ask what the dream job is,” he says. “This is it. To be a working actor.”
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