Robert Frost, with help from Gordon Clapp, takes the stage
Gordon Clapp, an Emmy winner for “NYPD Blue,” wanders amiably, almost absent-mindedly, onto the Roberts Studio stage as onetime poet laureate Robert Frost in “Robert Frost: This Verse Business.”
At first it appears the performance, through April 28 in the Calderwood Pavilion at Boston Center for the Arts, is simply a re-creation of one of Frost’s “talks,” free-wheeling combinations of poetry readings, politics, and whatever else was on the mind of the four-time Pulitzer Prize winner — which entertained nd and even gently educated a wide range of audiences in the 1950s and early ’60s.
Frost relished his populist appeal and the opportunity to share his love for “the pang that makes poetry,” not to mention his delight in crafting a clever couplet or a good metaphor that allowed “a momentary escape from confusion.” Clapp embodies the poet’s joy and mischievous sense of humor when asked to defend his word choices or is presented with someone’s determined interpretation of a poem. As the audience laughs in response to one of his wry comments,
Clapp warms to the audience, and begins engaging us even more, making the experience feel less like a performance and more like a conversation.
Clapp, who hails from New Hampshire (Frost’s childhood home) and has performed as Frost for nearly a decade, is steeped in the poet’s mannerisms. His recitations — dramatic monologues, really — of some of Frost’s most familiar works, including “The Road Not Taken,” “Away,” “Birches,” “Mending Wall,” and “Poetic License,” capture Frost’s vivid imagery of the natural world and our place in it. Hearing those poems aloud is a potent reminder of Frost’s gift for engaging the imagination, helping us feel the weight of the rocks in the mending wall (you know, “good fences make good neighbors”), the soft sound of snowfall in the woods, and the wind that bends the birch trees.
But it’s also a reminder that, while Frost’s poetry is still embedded in the educational curriculum, it has been 60 years since his death, and audiences could use a little more context around who this man was and how he moved in the world.
While playwright A.M. Dolan keeps the focus on Frost’s conversation with his audience, director Gus Kaikkonen moves Frost from a public stage to the porch of his Vermont home. The switch to sneakers and sweater signals a shift to more personal topics, but Frost’s family tragedies are rattled off like a list that simply must be gotten through, rather than heartbreaking experiences that influenced his work. He reads the poem “Franconia,” written by his daughter Marjorie, who died in childbirth, and at its conclusion simply says, “It was good, wasn’t it?”
Dolan understands the role Frost played — as a representative of a quintessential American voice — by reading and talking about his poetry to a wide range of audiences, but “Frost: This Verse Business,” at just 80 minutes, feels superficial. Just when we start to get in the groove of Frost’s gentle rhymes, or his folksy “free verse” talks, Dolan switches gears and it takes a while to orient ourselves again. When we move to his porch, it’s hard to understand why we are there, except that he’s now talking about his family.
Director Kaikkonen moves Clapp around the set, which is literal in the first half, including a lectern, chair, and table with flowers and a pitcher of water, and then figurative in the second, with a simple porch swing in front of a leaf-strewn scrim. While the shift from a specific auditorium setting to a more intimate place in Frost’s heart and imagination is visually effective, it’s not matched by clear transitions in the script. A more distinct frame for each setting would go a long way in helping us stay on this journey.
But you don’t have to be a Frost aficionado to enjoy hearing the power of his poetry, and his conviction that poetry is a pursuit, not an escape, that provides a kind of essential connection — to our world and to each other.