By Tom Ayres, Senior Staff Writer
All the world has surely been a stage for Gordon Clapp.
The affable, talented thespian, born in the ski resort town of North Conway, N.H., in 1948, first appeared under the bright lights in a hometown theater production as a 12-year-old. Since that humble childhood debut, Clapp has gone on to a distinguished, 64-year-long career as an award-winning television, film, and theater actor in Canada, the United States and, most recently, throughout his native New England, with occasional sojourns to star in compelling new plays in celebrated theaters throughout the country.
Norwich resident Gordon Clapp had a 12-year-run as the curmudgeonly Detective Greg Medavoy on the critically acclaimed ABC-TV police drama “NYPD Blue” from 1993 until 2005. In 1998, Clapp won The Television Academy’s Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series for his fan-favorite role in the drama series. Eric Liebowitz Photo. Courtesy of Walt Disney Television. Copyrighted by the American Broadcasting Companies, Inc.
These days, Clapp, 75, calls the Upper Valley home. He bought a house in Norwich about nine years ago after spending more than a quarter of a century living, not particularly happily, in Los Angeles. The Standard caught up with Clapp briefly on Monday evening, when he was spending a convivial evening with friends at his “local,” the Norwich Inn, and then reconnected for a longer chat via telephone from his home on Tuesday morning. The topics of conversation with the veteran actor ran the gamut from his Emmy Award-winning, 12-year-long stint as cranky but lovable fan-favorite Detective Greg Medavoy in the critically acclaimed ABC-TV police drama “NYPD Blue” from 1993 until 2005 to his more recent theatrical explorations of the life and times of Robert Frost, the venerated American poet.
Clapp also waxed ecstatic about his getting to portray one of his childhood football heroes in a play produced at the Bucks County Playhouse in Pennsylvania for a multi-week run last May and June. Seldom standing still, even at this latter juncture in his acting career, Clapp is taking his one-man show about Frost on the road again in April to mark the 150th anniversary of the poet’s birth. “Robert Frost: This Verse Business” is slated for a one-night-only performance at the Pinkerton Academy’s Stockbridge Theater in Derry, N.H., on Thursday, Apr. 4, and a weeklong rental-agreement performance in the Huntington Theatre Company’s intimate Nancy and Edward Roberts Studio Theatre at the Calderwood Pavilion in Boston’s South End later that month. In between there may be a condensed version of the Frost performance slated for students in the Hanover public schools. Details of all these performances will follow in subsequent issues of the Standard.
Gordon Clapp is pictured portraying the iconic American poet Robert Frost in a Peterborough (N.H.) Players production of “Robert Frost: The Verse Business,” a co-creation of Clapp and playwright Andy Dolan that has captivated audiences nationwide for the past decade. 2024 marks the 150th anniversary of the venerated poet’s birth and Clapp will be touring the Frost performance throughout New England in the coming year. Eric Rothhaus Photo
Clapp’s one-man performance as the iconic American poet first began taking shape about 15 years ago. The actor had long wanted to create a theatrical work about Frost, but it took a chance meet-up with a Massachusetts-based playwright to bring it to light. “It’s a curious tale, something that I always wanted to do,” Clapp recalled on Tuesday. “I’d wanted to bring Frost to the stage forever, ever since I read his biography. I’d always been sort of addicted to Frost since high school and I would do these little readings here and there of his narrative poems. In 2008, I decided that it was time to figure out how to do this.
“I was looking at this big, blank canvas and I thought my hands were tied in terms of telling a lot of his story because of the family — I didn’t think I would be able to get the rights to any of his story,” the actor continued. “And then I stumbled across this script. A friend of mine was reading plays at a theatre on Cape Cod and he put me together with the playwright, Andy Dolan, and I called Andy and said, ‘I’m your man.’ He didn’t actually know me, but I think he might have heard of me, basically. I don’t think he was even a fan of ‘NYPD Blue,’ but we got together and we’ve been holding it close ever since.”
Frost, Clapp offered, “barded around for the last 50 years of his life.” But the poet “never talked about his family or anything that was terribly personal, except for his opinions,” Clapp added. “Most of his talks were just off the cuff — he would just come out and start talking and maybe reference something local. He was just incredibly witty and charming — and he’d throw a poem or two in there and sometimes he’d take requests,” Clapp noted, chuckling. “It was pretty much impromptu.” Playwright Dolan listened to hundreds of hours of tape of Frost’s public appearances that he unearthed in libraries at Dartmouth, Middlebury, Harvard, and Amherst and “he transcribed all of it and then just cobbled together a beautiful through-line about Frost’s poetic process and his love of metaphor and couplets,” Clapp shared. “And we decided to bring the audience back to his cabin for a more cozy and intimate chat — and that’s what has really developed over the last 10 years.”
Robert Frost isn’t the only childhood hero that Gordon Clapp has portrayed in recent times. Last May, Clapp ventured to the fabled Bucks County Playhouse to star in the first full-scale theatrical production of the play “Tommy & Me,” penned by a longtime friend of Clapp’s, the legendary sports journalist from Philadelphia, Ray Didinger. The play is a valentine to the relationship between sports stars and fans everywhere. It tells the story of Didinger’s lifelong relationship with the famously tough Philadelphia Eagles flanker and wide receiver of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Tommy McDonald. In Didinger’s own words, the relationship “led us both down an unexpected path — straight to Canton, Ohio, and the National Football League’s Hall of Fame.” Clapp, it turns out, was also a fan of the notoriously irascible and colorful Eagles wide receiver in his own youth — and it meant the world for the Emmy-winning actor to play his sports idol on the Pennsylvania stage.
“[Tommy] was one of my favorite players, even though I wasn’t an Eagles fan. I got to see him a couple of times a year,” Clapp recalled. “The play is a wonderful account of his friendship with this journalist who, unbeknownst to Tommy, was his biggest fan when he was a kid. His family would take him to the Eagles training camp every summer and he befriended Tommy and would carry his helmet. And years later, Ray interviewed Tommy and he didn’t want to ask ‘Do you remember me?’ because he would have been devastated if he hadn’t remembered him. But Ray mentioned that he used to stand outside the Eagles clubhouse after games and Tommy said, incredulously, ‘Wait, you’re that kid!’ And Ray Didinger went on to become Tommy McDonald’s champion and helped get him into the Hall of Fame,” Clapp said, a sense of childlike wonder creeping into his own voice.
Gordon Clapp, left, received a Tony nomination, a prestigious Theatre World Award, and a New York Drama Desk Ensemble Award for his role in the revival of playwright David Mamet’s searing drama “Glengarry, Glen Ross” on Broadway in 2005. Scott Landis Photo, Courtesy of Gordon Clapp
Clapp has had many other significant theatrical accomplishments over the course of nearly 60 years in acting. He was cast in several films written and directed by his Williams College classmate from the late 1960s, the celebrated indie director John Sayles, including the 1979 cult classic “The Return of the Secaucus Seven,” as well as Sayles’ coal mining union labor pic “Matewan” and the acclaimed sports drama film “Eight Men Out,” based on the story of the notorious Chicago Black Sox betting scandal surrounding the 1919 Baseball World Series. Clapp played White Sox catcher Ray Schalk in the film. The veteran actor, now a confirmed denizen of the Upper Valley, was also nominated for a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play for his performance in a 2005 revival of playwright David Mamet’s “Glengarry, Glen Ross.” He notched a prestigious Theatre World Award and a New York Drama Desk Ensemble Award for his work in the emotionally charged Mamet work that same year.
These days, Clapp is enormously content to be carrying on his vaunted acting career from the cozy confines of his Norwich home, from which he ventures frequently to take to stages at regional theaters such as Northern Stage in White River Junction, where he played Jacob Marley in last December’s production of “A Christmas Carol,” as well as the Lost Nation Theatre in Montpelier, the Dorset Theatre Festival, New Hampshire’s New London Barn and Peterborough Players, and Boston’s Huntington Theatre.
“I never really liked Los Angeles in all the years I lived there and it feels just so right, after all that time wandering the globe for 40 years or more, to be back here in New England,” Clapp concluded, contentedly.