Gordon Clapp says as a young man he promised himself he would one day play New England poet Robert Frost. And for the past 10 years he has done just that through the one-man show “Robert Frost: This Verse Business” returning to the Peterborough Players Thursday.
“This was sort of a lifelong ambition. I’ve been a Frost fan since high school and when I was just out of college I read the biographies and I made a promise to myself that some how I would bring him to the stage, but I wanted to wait till I was older so I could get the older Frost, without so much makeup,” Clapp said in a recent interview.
Growing up in New Hampshire, Clapp said, Frost was the voice of New England and he could see Frost’s world all around him when he was a boy.
“The fact that so many of his poems were set in the world that I grew up in over in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. We learned that sort of standard poem in school – ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, ‘Mending Wall’, ‘The Road Not Taken’,” Clapp said.
And when he went away to a boarding school in Connecticut, Clapp said, Frost came along.
“I would read Frost to feel like I was back home in New Hampshire,” Clapp said. “I took him with me and he brought me home.”
Clapp remembers as a school boy being inspired to write numerous papers about Frost and attempting to imitate Frost’s voice when reciting his poetry.
“As an actor, even then I had ambitions as an actor, I loved to imitate voices so this was a fun sound to try to get. I certainly couldn’t get the roughness of him as an 80 or 90 year-year-old,” Clapp said of his childhood attempts at imitating Frost. “And he just had such a wonderful voice. … An old teacher of mine called it the sound of gravel running down the cellar steps.”
Clapp is best known for playing Det. Greg Medavoy for all 12 seasons of “NYPD Blue”. He won an Emmy Award for his work on the show in 1998. And is also a Tony nominated actor. He is fresh off a Lincoln Center production of “The Great Society.” He has an extensive television and Broadway career, has appeared in the films “Eight Men Out” and “Rules of Engagement” and in the television shows “Damages” and “Chicago Fire.”
He returns to the Peterborough Players’ stage Thursday in “Robert Frost: This Verse Business” directed by Players’ artistic director Gus Kaikkonen.
Clapp said a friend, who knew his desire to play Frost, passed on a script to him by A.M Dolan, who created the one-man show using lectures given by Frost in his college lecture years.
There is a lot of great material from these lectures, Clapp said.
In these talks, Frost never used notes or a script, he would talk off the cuff and recite his poems. It was like a standup routine, Clapp said.
“We workshoped it,” Clapp said of him and Dolan. “We’d done sort of an informal series of performances at the Hanover Inn and on the Dartmouth campus in 2008 and 2009. We did a few one-nighters in bars and church basements.”
But when the pair brought it to the Players for its first stage performance in 2010, Kaikkonen added his touch to the play, Clapp said.
“That was our first full production of the play,” he said, and “Gus really stepped it up. … We were working on it, but when Gus stepped in, he took it to a whole new level.”
Clapp said over the past 10 years he has performed the one-man show about 100 times and it has changed a little. Toward the end of the show Frost moves from the lecture hall to his cabin in the woods.
“I’m really excited to be bringing it back to Peterborough because it’s a great audience and I think they’ll like some of the new stuff we’re bringing to it,” Clapp said.
Clapp admits, a one-man show about Frost can be a hard sell, the world is not necessarily fond of “old white men” right now, but he thinks audiences will be pleasantly surprised at the enduring relevance and the timeliness of Frost and his work.
“People have said that this is a voice that we need at this time in this century,” Clapp said. “And that they are glad that I have helped to bring him back into focus in the 20th century in a small way.”
“Robert Frost: This Verse Business” opens Thursday and runs through Feb. 16.
Tickets are $43, and may be purchased online at www.peterboroughplayers.org or by calling the box office at (603) 924-7585 during box office hours.