A midsummer Frost: The Kate hosts a one-man play about the poet

July 05, 2024 1:13 pm • Last Updated: July 05, 2024 1:13 pm

By Rick Koster
Day Arts/Features writer

Gordon Clapp as Robert Frost (submitted)

Gordon Clapp as Robert Frost (Robert C Strong II)

It would have been, well, poetic if Gordon Clapp and Andy Dolan had met at that first spring thaw, jointly repairing a New England stone wall.

Didn’t happen.

What’s important, though, is that their respective and long-running affection for poet Robert Frost — whose poem “The Mending Wall” utilizes the above fence metaphor in a celebrated capacity – ultimately did lead Dolan and Clapp to one another in a more creative fashion.

Dolan is an actor and the award-winning playwright of a one-man play called “Robert Frost: This Verse Business,” a work that captures the title character’s art as well as his distinctive charisma and private life.

Clapp, 75, is the actor playing Frost this Sunday in a production of “This Verse Business” taking place at The Kate in Old Saybrook. Fans of film, television and theater are possibly familiar with Clapp’s career; he won an Emmy for portraying Detective Greg Medavoy during a 12-season run of “NYPD Blue” as well as a Tony nomination in 2005 for his work as Dave Moss in the Broadway revival of “Glengarry Glen Ross.”

Frost, arguably America’s best-known poet, was a four-time Pulitzer Prize winner came to personify his New England roots through his evocative but deceptively plainspoken poems and a series of “talks” he gave on three continents over half a century. The presentations, where he’d read or recite his work and offer commentary and anecdotes about all sorts of adlibbed topics ranging from politics to family — became in-demand events. And after he recited his poem “The Gift Outright” at the Presidential inauguration of John F. Kennedy, Frost came to be known by some scholars as America’s “rock star poet.”

Longtime fans

“I had an interest in Frost when I was a kid because he was considered a local and he’d gained a national following after he did the Kennedy Inauguration,” said Clapp, a New Hampshire native speaking by phone from his home in Vermont. “When I went away to school, I had his voice in my head and his poems helped me get over my homesickness.”

Dolan, a fellow New Englander who lives in Massachusetts, didn’t know Clapp when he wrote “This Verse Business,” but he’s been similarly fascinated since discovering a series of recordings of the poet on tour or lecturing at one of the schools where he taught — including Amherst, Middlebury, Harvard and Dartmouth.

“I was drawn into Frost by (those) recordings,” said Dolan in an amicably toned email interview wherein he engaged in the occasional Frost pun. “He had this funny, calm old wise man about him and delivered his talk with an accent from ‘north of Boston.’ Despite all his learning and interest in big ideas he was plainspoken — like his poetry (which I was not terribly familiar with).

“But it was his wit, primarily, that convinced me I had a chance for a play. Also, his extemporaneous way of talking — one idea casually, often amusingly, leading to the next — no notes and usually no ‘subject’ to his talk. It was just his ‘little say-so,’ as he called it, about whatever was on his mind.”

Predestination?

Dolan finished the first workable draft of “Robert Frost: This Verse Business” in 2010, and Dolan and Clapp happily acknowledge that their meeting was random, lucky and critically important.

Dolan had submitted “This Verse Business” to a new play workshop on Cape Cod, where it was read by an old friend of Clapp’s.

“My friend and I hadn’t been in touch in a long time, but he remembered my obsession with Frost,” Clapp laughed. “He told me he loved the play but couldn’t do anything with it in his circumstances and thought I should read it.

“It was the exact time I wanted to get back into theater but wasn’t sure what to do. Then I got the script, and it was the perfect format. Andy had listened to hundreds of hours of audio tapes and beautifully distilled Frost’s voice: the poetry, the creative process and the arts and his love of couplets and metaphor. I had to do it.”

Dolan said, “A gift from the theater gods was Gordon. He’d been thinking of doing a Frost play for decades. This has helped us to continually improve it — we’re obsessed with making every moment as great and entertaining as possible.”

New Hampshire’s Peterborough Players was the first company to produce “Robert Frost: This Verse Business,” and where Clapp and Dolan worked for the first time with the production’s longtime director Kaikkonen.”

The work has been in production off and on since — typically when Clapp is available. It won best new play at Evento’s in 2010 and best production in the 2013 United Solo Festival in New York City. It is also — and with great enthusiasm by Dolan and Clapp — in regular revision.

Dolan talked about the evolution of the play and how he realized that a focus only on the poetry wouldn’t be enough.

Going behind the poetry

“Since Frost talked about poetry and the arts so much, the script began to coalesce around that as the subject,” Dolan said. “He wanted to be popular — to have as many people as possible read his books and consider his thoughts about the world and life … (but) in a second scene that I eventually added to the play, I decided to have the artist invite people home with him to his Vermont cabin. I knew a more personal tone was going to be needed. Maybe the second part heads toward the old bard making some new art.

“Last fall, we added a sequence of him talking at length about his family. This, I think, helped me believe this really is a play.”

“I remember we did a very few early performances in Hanover at Dartmouth, and people were asking for more information,” Clapp said. “There was no biographical information in the original script – the focus was all about work and process and politics, critics and religion. And we gradually realized so much more was there.”

One enriching aspect of working on “This Verse Business” through the years and its evolution is the audience reaction. Both men talk about the gratification of meeting audience members whose parents or grandparents knew Frost, or maybe were the poet’s former students.

“It’s so great to have their validity,” Clapp said. “We call them ‘Frost-aceans.’”

Miles to go before they sleep

Inhabiting Frost over the course of the play’s history has given Clapp an enormous appreciation for the poet’s multifaceted personality and the depths of his poetry.

“He had such a passionate knowledge of his own work,” Clapp said. “There’s an uncomplicated, simple quality, almost like a Hallmark cards writer. That’s because he wanted readers to respond not with analysis or criticism but with emotion – and that’s when you realized the poems are MUCH deeper than they originally appear.

“Frost described an ‘ulteriority complex’ to his work. He doesn’t define that, and we’ve had some trouble with the script trying to define this in our own words to address his persona. For me, I think it’s that part of the poem that hits you right between the eyes. And when you learn about his family and his private life, it’s all very revealing.”

That’s an aspect Dolan has found gratifying to explore in the second part of the play.

“There’s a gradual revealing of the man behind the brilliant public mask — his losses, regrets, desires to make new poems, and his fundamental reliance on art to help him understand himself and the world.”

This year’s production of “Robert Frost: This Verse Business” particularly resonates with Clapp and Dolan inasmuch as 2024 marks the poet’s 150th birthday. But they’re not finished.

Dolan refers to ongoing efforts by academics who are compiling and organizing a massive collection of letters Frost wrote — providing previously unknown material about his life and process. “These letters are being incrementally published,” he said, “and it’s exciting to imagine what we might learn.”

“We’re obsessed with making every moment as great and entertaining as possible,” Dolan said. “As our ‘Tour de Frost’ continues now into its second decade, Gordon’s performance still amazes me. Frost biographer, novelist and poet Jay Parini saw the play last fall and said of Gordon, “I thought I was watching Frost.”