… I’d like to get away from earth awhile

And then come back to it and begin over.

May no fate willfully misunderstand me

And half grant what I wish and snatch me away

Not to return ...

Robert Frost,

— from Birches

Growing up in North Conway, N.H., in the 1950s and 1960s, Gordon Clapp roamed the kind of rocky terrain where Robert Frost once lived and farmed and taught and grieved while harnessing many of those experiences into poetry.

Even in his 20s, when he was acting in summer stock and indie films in northern New Hampshire, Clapp had some of that Frost-like aura, said Marisa Smith, a Hanover native who acted with Clapp back in those formative years. Now that Clapp has built an acting career that includes an Emmy award and a Tony nomination, and has moved back to New England, those qualities have become even more prominent.

“He has granite in his veins,” Smith, now a playwright living in Hanover, said this week. “He has that Yankee, chiseled, weatherbeaten face.”

Over the next 3½ weeks at Northern Stage’s Barrette Center for the Arts in White River Junction, Clapp, who moved to Norwich in 2014, will portray the poet in Robert Frost: This Verse Business, a one-man show that dramatist A.M. Dolan wrote in 2008 and that Clapp has been tinkering with ever since.

“He loves the poetry and he loves Frost,” Smith said. “He can access the melancholy in Frost. He has the light and the dark that he can access. It’s really a perfect marriage.”

Clapp first fell under Frost’s spell in his teens, after reading Out, Out — , a poem exploring the fragility and randomness of life through the eyes of a dying teenage boy. He dove into the poems as well as into the scholarship surrounding them during the rest of his formal education, and wrote a number of papers on Frost at the private South Kent School in Connecticut and then at Williams College.

He first pondered the idea of playing the poet onstage during the early part of his acting career in Toronto in the late 1970s.

“At that point I wasn’t sure how to go about it,” Clapp said during an interview at the Barrette Center last week, after playing Doctor Ronk in a matinee of Northern Stage’s production of A Doll’s House. “I wanted to wait until I was a little older.”

The intervening years comprised a wide range of roles, the most notable of which was Det. Greg Medavoy on NYPD Blue, the role that earned Clapp an Emmy.

He finally came back to Frost in 2008, a couple of years after he won acclaim for playing real-estate shark Dave Moss in a Broadway revival of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross. Two weeks after Clapp played Frost in a 10-minute video, a mutual friend who saw the video sent Clapp a script that playwright A.M. Dolan had just crafted from Frost’s writings and from recordings of the poet’s recitations around the country.

“I called right away and said, ‘I’m your man,’ ” Clapp said. Soon he began listening to tape-recordings of the often-impromptu readings that Frost gave at colleges around New England from the 1920s to the early 1960s.

“It seemed like the perfect format,” Clapp said, “this idea of ‘barding around.’ ”

Clapp and Dolan finally took it public at the Hanover Inn late in 2008, after Marisa Smith introduced Clapp to Carol Dunne, then a theater instructor at Dartmouth College and artistic director at the New London Barn Playhouse and now artistic director of Northern Stage.

“Gordon told me about This Verse Business and I thought it was such a gift to our community, partly because the poetry of Frost I think is taken for granted to an extent,” Dunne said this week.

Under the direction of Dolan, they scheduled three readings at the Hanover Inn — before which Clapp felt his first waves of doubt about the piece.

“I figured that this was going to be it, the make-or-break,” Clapp said. “The thought was that if this audience gets restless, this thing isn’t going to be seaworthy. But it really flew by.”

And soon the show grew wings and evolved from a reading into a full-fledged production at the Peterborough (N.H.) Playhouse, under the direction of Gus Kaikkonen. Clapp donned makeup, a wig and eyebrows of snow white, and both recited poems and held forth on life from the porch of a cabin.

“That’s when people started to come up and say, ‘I heard Robert Frost do a reading’ or ‘I knew Robert Frost. Thanks for bringing him back.’ There are so many of what I call Frostaceans: the people who were his neighbors, or students or faculty members at the schools where he read.”

Between movie and television projects over the next several years, Clapp, then living in New York continued to fine-tune his portrayal for performances around New England, including shows at Lost Nation Theater in Montpelier and around the Northeast Kingdom through Jay Craven’s Kingdom County Productions. In November 2013, This Verse Business won first place at the United Solo festival for one-person shows in New York City. While the award surprised Clapp, it didn’t shock his self-described “Gordon groupie” in Hanover, who’d seen every stage of the play’s evolution.

“He sinks into it,” Smith said. “He just inhabits it.”

Around the same time as the play won the solo festival, Clapp was starting to consider inhabiting the Upper Valley as his home base. Smith had introduced him to Elisabeth Gordon, and in 2014 they bought a house in Norwich. Soon Clapp, who was married to Gordon last fall, was acting regularly on local stages, including stints in Our Town at the New London Barn Playhouse and A Christmas Carol at Northern Stage.

“I was ready to come back to this part of the world,” Clapp said. “I could have gone back to the Mount Washington Valley, which still has some community theater, but there’s really nothing much coming through there these days. It’s not an area that has a lot of cultural advantages, or Equity Theater. Here we have the New London Barn, Northern Stage, Shaker Bridge. It’s culturally alive here. And this is a very smart audience here. It’s really fun to do Frost in an academic community. They really get him.”

Between plays and an ongoing TV gig as a chaplain in Chicago Fire, Clapp also has found time to do local projects such at the web-TV series Parmelee, in which he plays a police chief in a dysfunctional small town. Another of his friends from the North Conway summer-stock days, Lyme resident John Griesemer, co-wrote and co-directed the series.

“We sent him the script and he said, ‘Sure!’ ” Griesemer, who was in several John Sayles movies, two of them with Clapp, recalled this week. “As we went along he said to me, ‘This is a lot of fun. You’ve found some very good people. How about a second season?’

“I’ve written some episodes that lean heavily on his character, who Gordon, having grown up in this part of the world, knows in his bones, a character who has connections on the law-abiding side of town and the sketchy, more marginal people. As I was editing the first episodes, Matt Bucy and I would grin and sigh at these little, subtle things he’d do, that he’d bring to the role. Any time you see a movie set in northern New England, you can pick out the actors who are from away. Gordon, he just sounds like it. He moves like it.

“I think he’s maybe the most pure acting animal of all of us.”

While watching Clapp in an early iteration of This Verse Business, Griesemer flashed back to his childhood, when he listened to recordings that Griesemer’s father had made during a Frost reading at Amherst College in the 1930s.

“When I heard Gordon come out that night I went, ‘Whoa!’ It was there exactly,” Griesemer said. “It was eerie.”

“Gordon’s the guy to do it.”

For the next 3½ weeks, Clapp will be channeling Frost in a back-and-forth of repertory with A Doll’s House. That might be a challenge, if not for his long relationship with the poet.

“I’ve done him enough times now that I can pretty much slip right back into the character,” Clapp said. “It’s really stress-free. It has a soothing quality for me.”

Indeed, the only time Clapp can remember sweating the current version of This Verse Business, happened last fall.

“I read it for one of Frost’s granddaughters,” Clapp said. “It was maybe the most stressful performance I’ve ever done.”

If nothing else, Clapp hopes the show brings new readers to New England’s iconic poet, and perhaps coaxes another poet into the theater.

“I would love to get Donald Hall over to see it,” Clapp said.

Starting tonight at 7:30 with a preview staging at the Barrette Center for the Arts in White River Junction, Gordon Clapp performsRobert Frost: This Verse Businessthrough Oct. 28. Additional previews are scheduled for Friday night at 7:30 and Saturday afternoon at 2, before opening night at 7:30 on Saturday. For tickets ($13.75 to $32.75 for previews, $13.75 to $57.75 for regular performances, $20 for Tuesday’s show) and more information, visit northernstage.org or call 802-296-7000.

David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.

]]>