Emmy-winning actor Gordon Clapp (NYPD Blue) will bring his acclaimed portrayal of poet Robert Frost to Boston this Spring in the one-man show “Robert Frost: This Verse Business” by local playwright A.M. Dolan.The show portrays the great poet and platform legend whose public “talks” were hot tickets for nearly half a century. Theater Mirror spoke with Clapp as he prepared for the April 23-28 run at the Calderwood Pavilion in Boston.
by Mike Hoban
Theater Mirror: I understand that you’ve long had a love affair with Robert Frost’s work. How did you first discover him?
Gordon: It was the Kennedy inauguration (where Frost read “The Gift Outright”) – I’m that old – but I knew of him before that. Later in school, we were assigned “Out, Out,” which is a reference to “Out out brief candle!” (from Macbeth). It’s a very dark poem. In an idyllic setting, this horrific event happens. A boy gets his hand cut off by a buzzsaw in rural New England in the backyard of his home, and it really had an impact on me as a boy of that age in that setting, some fifty years later, and I just got addicted to Frost’s poetry. I would do little readings all through college, and a few years after college, I read his three-volume biography by Lawrence Thompson and said to myself, “I’ve got to bring this guy to the stage.” It took me thirty years to get around to it, but when I turned 60, I thought, “Now I can get away with playing the older Frost.”
I came across this script by Andy Dolan and thought it was the perfect format. However, it was a little long to have in a lecture hall, so we got together and started trimming it. Then, we workshopped it for a couple of years, and in 2010, we got an offer from the Peterborough Players in New Hampshire to perform it.
Theater Mirror: Was that the debut of the piece?
Gordon: We had been doing it in barrooms, church halls, and school auditoriums without all the bells and whistles and wigs and all that. We were just going to go and do what we had been doing since it’s pretty much our show, but we finally had a director, Gus Kaikkonen, and he brought the show to another level. He realized that we were missing a lot of the theatricality. He said, “You’re not Robert Frost. You’re an actor playing Robert Frost. They know they’re not coming to see Robert Frost. So your authenticity of how he said the poems, instead of performing them, is hurting the piece; it’s hurting the performance. You should feel free to perform them.”
Our reticence about doing that was to say, ‘Frost wants the reader to decide what the poem is,’ and in order to do that, there had to be some kind of attitude attached to each of the poems. So it’s all worked out beautifully, and it’s just a much fuller piece. And Frost aficionados who have seen it, including his granddaughter and all these members of the Frost Society, and Jay Parini and William Pritchard, two of his biographers, have seen it as well as some major actors, like Ken Howard, Richard Thomas, David Strathairn, and John Sayles…and we’ve had an incredible response to it.
Theater Mirror: You had mentioned earlier that you originally staged this in barrooms and church halls, so all I could think of was that this must be an honest labor of love and that you’re just really passionate about his work. Is that a fair assessment?
Gordon: Absolutely.When we first started doing the work, there were many audience members, many of whom are no longer with us, who were witnesses to Frost. Students and neighbors – especially doing it in New England – would wait and come up to us afterward, and we’d chat with them, or there would be Q&As where they would tell stories about Frost, and they were just so excited about it. The older people who are Frost fans, I call “Frostaceans,” and the younger people maybe not so much until we get into it a little bit, but there’s this feeling that I have walking out on stage every night as Frost that these people are connecting with Frost. And within the first 3 minutes of the show, I can tell who my kindred spirits are in the house, and they get me through the night.
For tickets and information, visit bostontheatrescene.com or call 617 933 8600.
