'NYPD Blue' actor Gordon Clapp brings poet Robert Frost to life in Wellfleet this weekend

Emmy-winning actor Gordon Clapp will have to watch his step ― literally, not metaphorically ― when he brings to life his favorite poet, Robert Frost in Wellfleet this weekend.

Still best known for playing Greg Medavoy in all 12 seasons of “NYPD Blue,” Clapp will perform the one-man show “Robert Frost: This Verse Business” on the restaurant set Harbor Stage Company built for its ongoing production, “My Dinner With Andre.”

The guest performances are at 7:30 p.m. Sunday and Monday, as part of a Harbor Stage Company fundraiser. Tickets, at $50 each, are available at harborstage.org /.

Clapp said he normally does the play on college campuses or at lecture halls, so he’ll have to be aware of restaurant set pieces as he embodies Frost.

“One of the things that always attracted me to Frost was his voice , his New England dialect,” Clapp said in a telephone interview. “I’m completely at home with it. I grew up with elders who spoke that way,” said Clapp, who grew up in New Hampshire's White Mountains region and still lives near there.

Lecture halls and college campuses were the original sites for what Frost called it when he “barded” around, wandering from place to place, a traveling tinker who sold part-time teaching on campuses and an inveterate walker who took students on long ambles. His gruff wit and the New England scenic poetry that was a framework for more philosophical questions drew standing-room-only crowds.

Those college devotees from the fifties and sixties are in their 80s now.

“We don’t always have full houses now," Clapp said. "We’re trying to sell an old straight white guy to colleges that want, and need, much more diverse and exotic material. But we need his voice. He said the poetry is a way of not losing the meaning.”

In the closing stanza of 1916's "The Road Not Taken," Frost wrote lines that resonated and became a cultural touchpoint quoted by many:

“I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.”

Clapp, 75, who was taken by Frost’s words in grammar school, really delved into the poet’s life after college. The actor was amazed by Frost’s resilience in a life that saw him outlive his wife and four of his six children.

Frost died at age 88, in 1963, a four-time Pulitzer Prize winner and an unofficial national poet laureate who presented his poem “The Gift Outright” at John F. Kennedy Jr.’s inauguration in 1961, with the last line rewritten for the nation’s youngest President.

Clapp watched the moment on TV and it cemented his interest in Frost. For years, while Clapp acted steadily in commercial TV, stage and Broadway productions (he played, for a year, the judge in Jeff Daniels’ revival of “To Kill A Mockingbird” on Broadway), Clapp kept an eye out for a Frost project.

In 2008, a mutual acquaintance reading plays for the Cape Cod Theatre Project got Falmouth playwright A.M. Dolan’s “Robert Frost: This Verse Business” into Clapp’s hands.

Since 2009, Clapp and Dolan, working with guidance from original director Gus Kaikkonen, have put the 80-minute Kaplan Award-winning play on more than 140 times in 10 states. After Cape Cod, they go to South Haven, Michigan, for one performance on Sept. 21.

Clapp said Kaikkonen helped him to slow down and really perform the dramatic tension in Frost’s poems and in his life.

“Many of his poems are a debate, sometimes a debate with himself,” Clapp said, noting that like Frost, the actor doesn’t “read” poems but rather “says” them, immersing himself in the memorized stanzas.

Clapp said he has had to balance his passion for playing Frost with more commercial roles that pay the bills. His next role in this area is in the East Coast premiere of “Pru Payne,” a story about memory and identity opening Oct. 18 at the Speakeasy Stage in Boston .

Although it’s been 19 years since “NYPD Blue” ended, the fact that Clapp still looks much the same and that show reruns pop up in syndication, means everyman cop Greg Medavoy is never far away. Clapp said he was grateful his character was one real police officers told him they recognized as someone in their squad.

Clapp still gets recognized for the role that earned him an Emmy and he doesn’t mind posing for pictures.

“It’s not like George Clooney or anything,” he laughed. “A lot of people are just trying to place where they know me from.”

Gwenn Friss is the editor of CapeWeek and covers entertainment, restaurants and the arts. Contact her at gfriss@capecodonline.com . Follow her or X, formerly Twitter: @dailyrecipeCCT

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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: 'NYPD Blue' actor Gordon Clapp brings poet Robert Frost to life in Wellfleet this weekend