Still Learning After All These Years

“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 has embodied countless brands of televised villainy, and who got his big break in movies as the cad who shot Ann-Margret full of heroin in “52 Pick-Up”? That 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 Dec. 9 at the Skylight Theater in Los Feliz, Glover earns exactly $5 a show.

“It’s for art,” Glover explains. “I want to keep--this seems so corny--I want to keep growing as an artist.”

“The Time of Your Life” gives voice to a procession of eccentric habitues who hang out in a San Francisco waterfront dive. Glover’s Joe is a mysterious man of means who shares his money and philosophy with anyone who comes through the door of Nick’s Saloon, Restaurant and Entertainment Palace. Joe buys up all the newspaper boy’s newspapers, orders champagne for strangers, orchestrates a romance between his handyman and the wistful neighborhood prostitute, dances gallantly with a lonely old woman. Why all the good deeds?

“I think he was a killer businessman,” Glover says. “I think he really destroyed lives in his quest for success, which is why he gives it all up and kind of throws his money at people. I think he’s trying to make up for his past sins. I’m sure there’s a way to play Joe 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.”

“The Time of Your Life” director Gene Reynolds says, “Glover has ideas, he takes a position. 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, Sept. 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 after Nazi Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in September 1939.

Glover, wire-rimmed glasses perched on his patrician nose, says, “Eddie Dowling, who played [the first] Joe, got Saroyan to write it. Saroyan went into a hotel and wrote [the play] in October, and he and Dowling directed it together in November. It’s a bizarre play, with not a lot of answers given. It’s 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.”

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 didn’t want to be a farmer in the FFA and didn’t want to be a homemaker in the FHA. So I went and joined the FTA--Future Teachers of America.”

Just one problem.

“I was terrified of being a teacher,” Glover admits. “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 University, then Towson State Teachers College, in Baltimore, Glover spent summers as an apprentice at the Barter Theater in rural Virginia.

After three seasons there, Glover moved in 1966 to New York. He 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’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 when he portrayed a sadistic heel in John Frankenheimer’s “52 Pick-Up.” “I played Alan Raimy, who was just the worst, amoral, despicable, fun-loving guy in the world.”

He even creeped out his co-star. “At one point in the movie, I kidnap Ann-Margret, 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. “All those villains are so fun to play, characters who are larger than life,” he says. “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?”

A few years after buying a Silver Lake home in 1989 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 eight 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 1994 Tony Award in the process.

“That was like a dream, an actor’s dream,” Glover says. “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, this huge script came.

“I knew that one [of the characters] 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.”

What devices did he rely on 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 onstage.”

The bittersweet drama rewarded Glover with one of his most memorable stage moments. “I remember one night, I got to the end of this 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. I thought, if nothing else, that was enough, to know that I’d gone down into somebody’s soul and touched somebody.”

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 in 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, all of those are of an incredibly finely developed degree.

“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 repertory of talents, but he still feels there’s room for improvement. So Glover is taking acting lessons.

“Is that funny? Why is that funny?” Glover asks.

Well, it’s surprising at least, that an actor with a Tony award, five Emmy nominations, 75 films and TV movies, and more than 100 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 faced. Since May, he’s been studying at the Beverly Hills Playhouse with Milton Katselas, whose Camelot Productions is staging “The Time of Your Life”

Says Glover, “The power that an artist can have to move people, I just want to equip myself better with those kind of skills. 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’ 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.

“I didn’t understand all these themes when I was young because, then, we had all the time in the world.”

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“THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE,” Skylight Theater, 18161/2 N. Vermont St., Los Feliz. Dates: Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Price: $20. Phone: (310) 659-0741.