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'Ernest Hemingway Alive' At The Senior Center

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‘Ernest Hemingway Alive’ At The Senior Center

By Nancy K. Crevier

Richard Clark, a 30-year veteran actor of New England regional and New York theaters, returned Monday, May 11, to the Newtown Senior Center on Riverside Road, for a one-man performance of Life, Language, and the Pursuit of Happiness — Ernest Hemingway Alive! Mr Clark has previously performed other works from his Keeping History Alive series at the Senior Center, including portrayals of Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, Shakespeare, and John Barrymore.

Dressed in an off-white field jacket, slouchy pants, and a brimmed cap, “Ernest Hemingway” entered the main room of the center reading from the preface of his first book, Torrents of Spring. His bewhiskered and bespectacled face was that of Hemingway in his later years, yet Mr Clark led the audience on a provocative history of the man he called “one of the most widely read and written about American authors, from his unsettled childhood through the 1960s.”

The gruff Hemingway persona that Mr Clark convincingly took on elicited laughter, gasps, and sounds of dismay as he painted a picture of the author’s turbulent life and how those life experiences played into Hemingway’s writing.

A reading from Fathers and Sons, as well as an excerpt from For Whom The Bell Tolls, reflected the animosity and disappointment between himself and his father, and between his mother and father. The antagonistic relationship he had for most of his life with his mother — who thought his writing coarse and low — is spelled out in a statement in his novel Farewell To Arms, quoted by Mr Clark aka Ernest Hemingway: “What if you were born loving nothing and the warm milk of your mother’s breast was never heaven….”

Mr Clark shared other readings from the works of Ernest Hemingway as the hourlong presentation quickly slipped by, including Indian Camp, a story based on his World War I experiences.

From a reporter for the Kansas City Star where Hemingway learned his most valuable lesson, “Make every word count,” through his experiences as an ambulance driver in Word War I, in the Spanish War, and World War II; during his wayward life in Paris with his first and second wives, and where he rubbed elbows with his writing contemporaries T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Scott Fitzgerald; as he wove his legacy in Key West, Fla., of a hard drinking, womanizing playboy obsessed with “bulls, booze, broads, and books — not necessarily in that order,” and where he penned his first full-length novel, The Sun Also Rises, as well as To Have and Have Not; his subsequent life in Cuba, where Cuban street urchins Christened him with the name so many came to know him by, “Papa”; to his later days penning of a tribute for John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, Richard Clark smoothly blended the tales of the famous author’s life into an afternoon of informed entertainment.

In July 1961, the “papa” of a straightforward and concise form of writing shot himself to death at the age of 61, following the sad legacy of his father and two siblings.

As with each of his previous engagements at the Newtown Senior Center, a satisfied audience enthusiastically applauded Mr Clark’s final lines, a tribute to his skill at “Keeping History Alive.”

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