Emmy winner Gordon Clapp stars in the one-man show ‘Robert Frost: This Verse Business,’ coming Thursday to the UM Gertrude C. Ford Center for the Performing Arts. Copyright 2017 Robert C Strong II
OXFORD, Miss. – Emmy-winning actor Gordon Clapp, of “NYPD Blue,” stars in the one-man show “Robert Frost: This Verse Business” at 7:30 p.m. Thursday (Aug. 30) at the University of Mississippi’s Gertrude C. Ford Center for the Performing Arts.
Frost, who for nearly 50 years traveled around the country charming audiences with his celebrated verse and rascally sense of humor, was one of America’s most celebrated poets. “This Verse Business” gives audiences insight into what seeing Frost in person was like through Clapp’s acclaimed performance.
The show’s playwright, Andy Dolan, said Frost’s wit and perception of the world around him was on par with that of a celebrated author from Oxford.
“Both Oxford’s own William Faulkner and Robert Frost hand a unique ability to find the universal by means of an intense focus on their local environments,” Dolan said. “Both writers could hear poetry in the everyday speech of their neighbors.”
Clapp, who is best known for his Emmy-winning role as Detective Greg Medavoy on ABC’s “NYPD Blue,” brings uncanny authenticity and joy to his Frost, the American literary “rock star” of his day. Using materials pulled from actual recordings and interviews, Clapp shares the funny and flinty icon’s poems and pointed “wild surmises” on religion, science and politics.
Dolan and Clapp also will host a master class in the Ford Center Studio Theater at 1 p.m. Friday (Aug. 31). The class is free and open to the public.
Tickets are $25 for the orchestra/parterre, $20 for the mezzanine and $15 for balcony seats. Tier 1 box seats are $25, tier 2 box seats are $20. A 20 percent UM faculty/staff/retiree discount is available at the UM Box Office with a UM ID. Student tickets are $10 for all seats, with an Ole Miss student ID required, also at the UM Box Office.