The time’s right for a spring Frost in Boston

BOSTON – Perhaps it was a coincidence, but on an early spring day in Boston this week a frost descended on the area, reminding us that quite often the New England winter is slow to leave and give way to spring.

There is someone who understood that very well and often described it in his poetry, which won him four Pulitzer Prizes.

The late Robert Frost was a New England icon, and this month we observe Poetry Month and this year the  150^th anniversary of the poet’s death.

Emmy-winning actor Gordon Clapp (NYPD Blue) is bringing his acclaimed portrayal of Frost to Boston this week in the one-man show “Robert Frost: This Verse Business” by local playwright A.M. Dolan.  

It’s an entertaining portrait of the great poet and platform legend whose public “talks” were hot tickets for nearly half a century and an illuminating glimpse of the old bard at home, aware of his fame and failures, with poems still to write and “promises to keep.”  

Directed by Gus Kaikkonen, performances will run through Sunday, April 28 in the Roberts Studio Theatre at Boston’s Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, with performances Thursday and Friday at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $75 – $25. For more information, visit bostontheatrescene.com or call 617-933-8600. 

“The Boston performances reflect a homecoming of sorts for the poet, who had a home on Beacon Hill and then, for the last two decades, in Cambridge on Brewster St.,” said Dolan.  “He died in Boston, just weeks after giving his final ‘talk’ at the Ford Hall Forum.  2024 is the 150th anniversary of his birth, and April is ‘Poetry Month.’  The time felt right for the Boston premiere.”

“Frost is a voice that we need in this century,” Clapp said. “I feel like I’m bringing him into this time again.” 

In Clapp’s acclaimed portrait, the flinty old poet shares his verse from memory, along with witty “wild surmises” on art, religion, science, “radicals,” and “conservatives.” Culled from actual recordings and Frost’s writings, the production reveals in measured glances both the public and private faces of an American icon, whose poems about rural New England became a canvas for exploring deeper philosophical and social ideas.  Included in the play are best-known poems such as “Birches,” “Mending Wall,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” and ‘The Road Not Taken.”

Clapp said that when he performs, he can feel an aura of expectation from certain audience members, hard-core Frost fans whom he calls “Frost-aceans” (like crustaceans). But he doesn’t attribute this energy to his acting.  “They’re addicted to the poetry, and they’re so moved by it,” Clapp said. “I don’t give myself a lot of credit for that. It’s Frost himself right there.”

Gordon Clapp has played Robert Frost more than 130 times at regional theatres and college towns in ten states.

 Mr. Clapp’s long career in theatre, television, and film includes his most recent Broadway performances as J. Edgar Hoover to Brian Cox’s LBJ in The Great Society in 2019 and as Judge Taylor, opposite Jeff Daniels’ Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird in 2021.  

In 2023 he played Gus Cudahy, the unexpected love interest of Mimi Kennedy’s “public intellectual” Prudence Payne, in the Arizona Theatre Company’s world premiere of Pru Payne and the title role of NFL legend Tommy McDonald in Tommy and Me at the Bucks County Playhouse.

 Numerous film credits including Matewan and Eight Men Out with loads of television guest and recurring roles. Clapp’s 12-season portrayal of Detective Greg Medavoy on NYPD Blue earned him the Emmy Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama Series in 1998.  He has most recently been seen on HBO’s Mare of Easttown and Showtime’s American Rust.