Playwright A.M. Dolan and award-winning actor Gordon Clapp have crafted a evening with Robert Frost that, to hear them tell it, is as hardy and deep and soulful as the crusty old New England superstar poet was himself.
“Robert Frost: This Verse Business” is coming to the Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center in Old Saybrook for a single performance on July 7.
This year marks the 150th anniversary of Frost’s birth. It’s hard to put into focus how popular and influential he was in his time. He wrote at a time when poetry wasn’t largely the domain of academics, when popular poetry columns appeared in daily newspapers and national magazines and you could often find poets like Louis Untermeyer and Ogden Nash serving as panelists on TV game shows.
Frost’s fame was greater than any of the TV-friendly poets. Seemingly everyone in mid-20th century America not only knew his name but could recite a line from one of his poems. Some of his best-known poems such as “Mending Wall” and “Death a Hired Man,” came from a collection that was first published in 1914. Nearly 50 years later, Frost delivered the inaugural poem at the swearing-in of President John F. Kennedy in 1961.
Frost’s work has endured, still in print and taught in high schools and studied in colleges and printed on dishtowels. He has been discovered by younger generations partly through the use of his poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay” in a novel that’s also ubiquitous on required high school reading lists, S.E. Hinton’s “The Outsiders.”
Yet the sense of Frost as a public figure, celebrity and especially as a human being has been lost over the years. He didn’t like to share stories of his private life.
In his time, Frost was naturally widely sought after for public readings and speaking engagements. He also apparently had a knack for such events, adding jokes or commenting on current events while discussing his works in depth. His prowess as a public speaker is the jumping off point for “This Verse Business.” The play is almost entirely pieced together from tapes of talks Frosts gave over the years. Many of his poems are read in their entirety, then talked about.
As a playwright, Dolan realized that while a public appearance by Frost had great entertainment value, it was also missing a major dramatic element. “This began as ‘the public guy,’” Dolan said. “I just fell in love with the recordings but I kept thinking, ‘What’s he like at home? Let’s go there.'”
Over halfway through the play, the setting quietly shifts from Frost at the lectern in the hall to him having brought the audience with him to his writing cabin at the Breadloaf Writers Conference, the celebrated poets retreat which was also in Middlebury. There, “he adopts a more private attitude and talks more about family,” said Dolan. “It changes from a public sphere to a more intimate sphere.”
The idea of the poet bringing fans over to his cabin isn’t completely fanciful. Frost could be quite gregarious and social, with many close friends in the poetry world. “He was quite generous with his time. He worked with young poets,” Dolan said.
Yet, Dolan added, “he also had a paranoid side. One side of his family had loads of mental illness plus there was some on the other side as well.”
Gordon Clapp has been a Frost fan since he was at the South Kent School in Connecticut in the 1960s. The New Hampshire native still avidly collects books and biographies of the poet.
“It’s been an obsession of mine since high school,” the actor said. He’d read many of Frost’s poems in school, then “the Kennedy inauguration put a face on it.” He recalls being particularly entranced by “Out, Out,” in which a young boy loses his hand to a buzzsaw.
He said Dolan’s script meets that obsession. “I was waiting to play this for over 30 years when I took it up in 2008,” said Clapp, who was in his 20s when he first considered performing as Frost but decided he wanted to play the older Frost.
It allows him to share the Robert Frost he’s always loved. “These days, all they know is a few quotes, a couple of poems,” Clapp said. “They may think he was a guy who wrote for Hallmark cards. He was a rock star poet, a poet not to missed. He was a little like a standup comic in a way. People don’t realize how funny he was. He had a way of looking at things that was peculiar.
“When he did a reading, he never had a set,” Clapp added. “He had a number of poems he would look to. He’d get off on tangents about politics, religion and the nature of poetry.”
Clapp has been in some of the exemplary acting ensembles of his era. He was Detective Greg Medavoy for 12 seasons on the ensemble-powered series “NYPD Blue” and he was also a member of the select group of actors chosen to be in multiple films for indie director John Sayles, including “Return of the Secaucus Seven,” “Eight Men Out” and “Matewan.” Connecticut played an important role in his early acting training: Clapp was the inaugural class of the National Theatre Institute program, which began in 1970 at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford.
Now Clapp finds himself as Frost commanding the stage solo and interacting with audience members.
“I usually find two or three kindred spirits in the audience,” he said. “We did it for a class at Dartmouth where some of the people had been in the last class Frost taught there. He was famous for taking long walks, often with students, though it was a one-way conversation.”
Clapp tries to bring to the stage that spirit of being in the room with a genius writer who has a lot on his mind.
Dolan wrote the play before he found the performer who adopted it a deeply personal project. The playwright was looking to get a reading of “This Verse Business” done and approached the Cape Cod Theater Project in Falmouth, Massachusetts, which specializes in new play readings. The theater couldn’t offer to develop the play, but its director recalled Clapp’s interest in Frost and connected him with Dolan. Now “This Verse Business” is Clapp’s to perform. “It has only been Gordon Clapp, and that’s the way I like it,” Dolan said.
Clapp has been performing “This Verse Business” around the country for almost 15 years, but Dolan continues to add to the play, especially when he finds new information about Frost’s personal life as expressed by the poet himself. Last September, he came upon new material about one of Frost’s sons, Carol, whose death the poet grieved throughout the rest of his life yet rarely wrote or spoke publicly about. “We cared so much for him that his cloud was our cloud,” the Frost character says in the play.
Unlike a lot of one-person shows, Dolan and Clapp aren’t making a big deal out of any close physical or vocal impersonation of the person the show’s about. The single best of advice he said he got about “This Verse Business” was from the director Gus Kaikkonen when the show was first produced by Peterborough Players in New Hampshire in 2010. “Gus figured that Gordon shouldn’t attempt to be too neat to Robert Frost’s voice or pace.”
“This Verse Business” is a sort of hit-and-run operation, with Clapp starring and Dolan producing and rewriting, in between other theater or movie gigs. Each engagement tends to be a single performance in a single venue in a single state. Clapp estimates he’s performed the show “around 150 times in a 16-year period,” making chances to see it fairly rare. This is the first time the play has ever played Connecticut. The closest it has come before now is a Springfield performance five years ago.
“The Kate will be good for this. He’ll be close to the audience,” Dolan said.
Dolan and Clapp are also looking for other theaters in Connecticut to bring the show.
“This year is the 150th anniversary of his birth,” Clapp said, “so we’re trying to get Robert Frost back into this century.”
“Robert Frost: This Verse Business,” written by A.M. Dolan and starring Gordon Clapp, will be performed July 7 at 2 p.m. at The Katharine Hepburn Cultural Art Center, 300 Main St., Old Saybrook. $49. thekate.org .
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