ROLE WITH LINES, NO WORDS : ‘TRAVELER’: A NEW AVENUE FOR GLOVER

Imagine you are an actor with 20 years of stage and film work behind you. You are cast in a play as a workaholic composer of modern operas who is struck down by a heart attack, and then a stroke. This results in aphasia--the inability to use or understand words.

The character slowly recovers through the rest of the play, putting the pieces and the words back together. As an actor, virtually none of your lines make literal sense. Your job is to give them, and the character, emotional sense. How do you do it?

Ask John Glover, who is deep in this task nightly in “The Traveler” at the Mark Taper Forum. He is also on television starting Sunday as Lee Remick’s co-star in the NBC miniseries “Nutcracker: Money, Madness and Murder.”

“I honestly don’t know.”

Say that again?

“I mean I was very frightened about it, but I knew I had to try. There were hunks of the script, like when he’s in bed muttering ‘Shasha fola, shashla a lash la a la fola,’ that gave me no idea how they were going to work. I let myself go, and imagined what it was like not to be able to understand.”

Glover, a medium-built man of 42 with classical Grecian features, sometimes sounds like he’s in suspended animation, his voice soft, almost expressionless, with deep feelings paradoxically coming through loud and clear.

When he says about the making of “The Traveler” (with director Steven Kent, playwright Jean-Claude van Itallie and the play’s inspiration, Open Theatre founder Joseph Chaikin) that “it was like a new person emerged from me during this,” he may sound like a fellow who’s found God. Only the fellow’s not kidding.

During an interview, Glover kept referring to the mysticism of the acting experience, a phenomenon one couldn’t really know until one had tried it.

“One day between a rehearsal and a preview,” he said, “I took a nap and started thinking about the whole show (he’s on stage nearly every moment), and I started to panic. So I made myself trust in the rehearsal process, which took me from beat to beat and scene to scene. Not thinking ahead was the key. It’s really a lesson in being in the present, which is just how the traveler survives.”

But there must have been trunkloads of research.

“No. I didn’t really have much time. After I was cast in December, just after ‘Nutcracker’ finished filming, I took my first vacation in a long time. I tried to set up hospital visits with stroke patients and obtain tapes, but they never worked out.

“I did watch a videotape of Sam Shepard and Joe (Chaikin) doing ‘Savage Love’ and ‘Tongues,’ which Joe did after his stroke. So that, along with Joe’s presence during rehearsals, Jean-Claude’s script--which was written so honestly--my imaginings and Steven’s help all fed my work.”

Perhaps, but they are morsels compared to what his protean performance suggests. Glover has had no formal training: His alma mater, Towson Teachers College (now a Maryland state university), is hardly Yale.

He told of “fearlessly” jumping on a Manhattan-bound bus in 1966 after only three seasons of summer stock at Virginia’s Barter Theatre, with no prospects in sight. He soon became one of the steadiest-working actors in the then-burgeoning regional theater movement, with credits stretching from the Taper (“Juno and the Paycock”) to Washington’s Arena Stage.

“I’ve never felt,” he said, grappling for the right word, “part of any acting community. I guess that’s a leftover from my youth, when I felt apart from everything and everyone, including myself.”

He is out of the ordinary, too, in his passion for not repeating himself in any medium. As perhaps last year’s most loathsome villain in John Frankenheimer’s film “52 Pick-Up,” it was, he said, “the perfect chance to play a really bad guy. And then my part as Richard Behrens, Lee Remick’s accomplice in ‘Nutcracker,’ is way over here ,” Glover said, pointing from left to right, as if mapping out his personal geography as an actor scouting for roles. “And ‘The Traveler’ is way over there. “

Because he tried to separate himself as far from the image of Chaikin as possible during “Traveler” rehearsals, Glover considers Behrens to be the first living person he’s portrayed. Behrens was a close friend who helped in Frances Schreuder’s plot to have her teen-age son murder her millionaire father.

Based on the book by Shana Alexander, the three-part “Nutcracker” will air at 9 p.m. Sunday, Monday and Tuesday on NBC (Channels 4, 36 and 39).

“It was spooky for Lee and me,” Glover said, his steely eyes staring straight ahead, “because we were filming in New York close to where Behrens lived. And sure enough, I ran into him.

“He said, ‘What are you doing playing me? You’re tall and svelte, and I’m short and fat.’ What do I say? Then he said, ‘Well, it doesn’t matter.’ Then he talked non-stop for 10 minutes about himself.”

Was he helpful?

“Yeah,” Glover said with a smile--mystically, it seemed. “He gave some clues.”