click to enlarge - Courtesy Of Alex Woodward
- Gordon Clapp in Robert Frost: This Verse Business
Acclaimed poet Robert Frost spent his last 24 summers living at the Homer Noble Farm in Ripton and lecturing at Middlebury College's Bread Loaf School of English before his death in 1963.
But the former poet laureate of Vermont will come alive again in Robert Frost: This Verse Business, a Middlebury Acting Company production playing Friday, September 8, to Sunday, September 10, at Town Hall Theater in Middlebury. Emmy Award-winning actor and Norwich resident Gordon Clapp embodies an 88-year-old Frost in the one-man show, a biographical monologue interspersing Frost's poetry with his musings on politics, religion, science and the arts. Middlebury professor Jay Parini, author of Robert Frost: A Life, will participate in a Q&A following the Saturday performance.
"Frost is a voice that we need in this century," Clapp said. "I feel like I'm bringing him into this time again."
Clapp has performed the show in about 30 towns since the play's 2010 premiere in Peterborough, N.H. But seeing it in Middlebury will be special, playwright Andy Dolan said, since it's where he "imagined the whole thing to take place." The play's opening setting is a public hall in Middlebury — no suspension of disbelief required.
"It's slightly daunting," Clapp said of performing in Frost's old stomping grounds.
About 85 percent of the play's script is verbatim speech from recordings of Frost, Dolan said, a result of combing through library archives at Amherst, Dartmouth and Middlebury colleges.
"I discovered a huge amount of material," Dolan said. "Once I started to transcribe what I was hearing, I could very easily imagine a play about this guy onstage by himself."
Though known for his poetry depicting rural New England, Frost was born a flatlander in San Francisco in 1874. He moved to Lawrence, Mass., for high school after his father died of tuberculosis in 1885. From there, Frost's New England connections grew: He briefly attended both Dartmouth College and Harvard University; his family purchased a poultry farm in Derry, N.H.; he taught at the New Hampshire Normal School (now Plymouth State University) and Amherst College; and he owned a home in Shaftsbury (now the Robert Frost Stone House Museum) before ending up on the Homer Noble Farm.
"Either Vermont or New Hampshire, those two states together are the backdrop," said Parini, Frost's biographer. "It's the kind of setting for almost all of his work."
Frost even got the hang of Upper Valley humor. His Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative poem "New Hampshire" ends with the ironic line "At present I am living in Vermont."
Clapp said he incorporates Frost's dry humor throughout the play, whether taking jabs at free-verse poetry — which Frost famously compared to playing tennis without a net — or joking about people's lack of appreciation for poetry and the arts.
"I've added little quips and things that I thought would work and would be in the voice of Frost," Clapp said. "It's hard to be wittier than he is, but I think he would have approved of some of the things that we just stuck in there."
Along with accurately representing his character, Clapp said it was important to reproduce Frost's distinctive rough voice, which he compared to "gravel running down cellar steps."
The play shifts in tone when the setting moves to Frost's cabin in Ripton, an environment that Clapp said allows Frost to "take the audience home with him" and get personal. Frost's private life was filled with struggle; he suffered from depression, lost both of his parents at a young age and outlived four of his six children.
Known to lash out, Frost once set a small fire to some papers after heckling a poet at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in 1938. The incident — which some believe may have been an accident — led a friend of his to remark that Frost was a "good poet" but a "bad man."
Frost's handpicked biographer, Lawrance Thompson, portrayed Frost as a "monster of egotism" who left behind "a wake of destroyed human lives," as critic Helen Vendler wrote in the New York Times. Parini said he sought to reframe the narrative in his biography, placing Frost's behavior in the context of tragic life circumstances.
Clapp, who was aware of the conflicting accounts when deciding to participate in the play, said it was important to him not to vilify the poet. He first heard Frost's voice at 12 years old, watching him recite a poem at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961. He said he's "clung to Frost" ever since, enamored of poems such as "After Apple-Picking," describing a New England fall, and "Out, Out—," the haunting story of a young boy who dies after a farm accident.
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. You know, it's Frost himself right there."