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.”
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