Tony Winner Glover Looks Homeward

Washington Post Staff Writers
Joe Brown

Kara Swisher
Washington Post Staff Writers
Column: BACKSTAGE
June 24, 1995; Page D2

For his beyond-Patty Duke turn as twin British gay brothers in "Love! Valour! Compassion!," John Glover recently won the Tony Award for best performance by a featured actor in a play. Leafing through the playbill before a recent matinee of the beautifully written Terrence McNally comedy-drama about the "chosen family" ties among eight gay men, we noted that the first thing mentioned in Glover's bio is that he "began his career at Robert Porterfield's Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Va., in 1963."

"It's where my roots start in the theater," says Glover, reached at his Manhattan apartment. "I worked down there three summers, '63 to '65."

Glover had just finished his freshman year at Towson State University and his mother urged him to apply for a summer apprenticeship at the state theater of Virginia in the far southwestern corner of the state near Tennessee.

"You had to pay $100 a month and you work backstage for the summer -- it's like slave labor: painting scenery, moving things," Glover laughs. "But Mr. Porterfield had a rule -- the person that's right for the part gets the part. That first summer they were doing Look Homeward, Angel,' and I got the lead! Ned Beatty was in it and Jerry Harden too. There were artistic ideals that Bob Porterfield set up in my system that I still have today."

At the Barter, Glover also worked with actresses Elizabeth Wilson and Patricia Neal, who recently revisited the theater to inaugurate a scholarship for an apprentice in Neal's name.

"Elizabeth called me and said, Pat Neal and I sat in the Martha Washington Inn and watched the Tonys. And there were the two of us, weeping, John, when you won your Tony,' " Glover says. "That moved me so."

Glover's family still lives an hour or so up the road from the Barter (which last night opened the world premiere of David DeBoy's gender-bender "Dr. Jekyll and Miss Hyde"), and he drops in now and then during the summer.

And two years ago, Towson State started an acting scholarship in Glover's name. "The sweetest way someone could congratulate me," he says, "would be to make a donation -- even $5 or $10 -- to that scholarship for a young actor."

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