I have been charged with asking a question to the actor playing glory a single question. Which is tougher than it sounds. We’ve spent a lot of time refining questions trying to find the right balance between something specific and something that covers a lot of ground. There are a multitude of questions I could be asking but for now I have chosen:
What is driving you to go along with Rhea’s regimen?
I think this question is crucial to Glory’s position at the beginning of the play. When we first meet Glory, he’s coming back from another race and is just about to be sent out for another. He meets Dante and Toni who ask him if he likes what he does. He loves to run but perhaps Rhea’s regimen is too much. In Glory’s words:
She’s always looking for something impossible to put me through. She finds some over the top competition. I am notified. I get tested for doping. I train. I get tested for doping. I do the competition. I win. I get tested for doping. It’s like she’s got somethingto prove. Like she’s just waiting to completely bury me under some non-existent guilt.
So, it’s a vicious cycle. But why go along with it? I think that’s the million-dollar question (or at least one of them). Glory is an adult, why doesn’t he just give it up? He can run all he wants without allowing this torture he’s being put through. This is why I believe that the actor’s answer to this question is so important. I think we can glean a lot about the character early on in the play from his behavior around with Rhea and the races. Does he deserve the torture and if so why? Does he feel powerless to Rhea such that he has no other choice? Does Zeus play a role in this? The answer to these questions will change drastically over the course of the play but I think it is crucial to know where we stand at the beginning.
I think this kind of crafting is really important to for an actor to understand their character. The actors understanding will hopefully better establish the audience's understanding. We learn more about Glory slightly later in the play after he overhears an argument between Zeus and Rhea when he tells us that he wishes he would die at one of his races. It might be the case that Glory’s answer to my question can help clue the audience in to this feeling early on in the play.
So that’s my one distilled questionfor the actor playing Glory. If I can, I’d like to cultivate the kind of crafting that I personally aspire to do with every role but don’t necessarily achieve. We always hope to be the actor who understands their character backwards and forwards. As much as I can, I want to help the actor playing Glory be that actor. So, this one question will hopefully be the first of many.