Notes on Belasco's THE RETURN OF PETER GRIMM

In his The Theatre Through its Stage Door, Belasco reveals much about the practical aspects of his production of The Return of Peter Grimm:

"The problem of lighting was especially difficult...since ...it was necessary to indicate the contrast between life and death. Doing away with footlights helped me considerable, but it took five months of experiments to accomplish the results I sought. I invented special reflectors to produce the ashen hue of death, but something always seemed lacking. I kept David Warfield in New York all summer, standing alone ont he stage for hoursat a stretch, while I threw various lights upon him. Then it occurred to me that the trouble lay in the kind of clothes he wore. I sent for fity bolts of cloth and wrapped him in the different fabrics and colors, until I found one which made him look mysterious and far away. Even then his appearance was not quite right. When other characters came on the stage things went wrong. Finally I tried the expedient of casting a cold gray light upon his features from above, while, at the same time, I illuminated the faces of the other characters in the play with a faint rosy glow. It was necessary to havemany of these lights of differing quality which, one after the other, "picked up" the people as they moved from place to place on the stage. The effect was exactly what I desired, and it proved to be one of the most important factors in the success of the play." Nor did Belasco neglect details of furniture and properties. He confessed: "I purchased the old Dutch furniture I used in 'The Return of Peter Grimm' fully two years before I had put the finishing touches on the writing of that play."

Though sometimes, only dramaturgy would do: Belasco discusses "instances in which the most vivid and impressive effects of character can best be secured by adopting a negative method of projecting it....My purpose in [The Return of Peter Grimm] was to show, in the person of a living actor, the survival of the influence of a powerful personality after death. In other words, it was to become the difficult task of David Warfield, for whom the character was written, to impersonate not an animate being, but a ghost, or shade. I never had any doubt of Mr. Warfield's ability to perform his share in carrying out my conception of the character. An actor of his intelligence and technical resources could scarcely fail. The difficulty of my problem lay in what would be the attitude of the surrounding characters toward a commanding personage who was never to be seen or heard, but whose presence was always felt. I foresaw that, in impersonating Peter Grimm, no matter how convincing Mr. Warfield's acting might be, the conviction which the character must ultimately carry to the audience would depend upon the acting of those around it.

"In the writing of that play I had trouble from the very start. To make old Peter's character clearly understood, it was necessary that he be represented in life through at least one act. The dramatic conflict of the story, however, had to come in the two succeeding acts, when he must be kept on the stage constantly in spirity form. It would have been comparatively east, of course, to sustain such an illusion for only five or ten minutes. At a time when the public was less sophisticated in matters of the theatre than it is today it might have been possible to heighten an illusion of ghostliness by the aid of suggestive lights. Here, though, was a case in which an audience was given two hours in which to analyze the character. If, even for a moment it failed to suggest death--if, for so much as a single second, it appealed to a sense of the ridiculous--the fate of the whole play was sealed.

"I decided that the most convincing effects could be secured by employing the simplest means. First of all I had to create around the living Peter an atmosphere of memories. The house in which I revealed him was bu ilt by his ancestors of a century before--old-fashioned, quaint, and mellow, and yet with the few modern improbvements which naturally wouold be made in sucha a place. The furniture, gathered by the founders of his family, had to be old and worn; the ancient clock that almost spoke as it ticked, the great fireplace, with armchair and stool before it--trifling objects, to be sure, butr all of a kind that might be hallowed by recollections of the departed one. Thus I gradually evolved the environment in which it seemed to me the story could best be told.

"It was then necessary to choose a nationality for Peter which harmonized with the mood of the play. I recalled the characters out of Grimm's Fairy Tales, "The Flying Dutchman," "Rip Van Winkle" and other beautiful, fanciful figures of fiction, and decided he would be most appealing if I represented him as Dutch. To give him a profession in life I considered many things. I wanted him to symbolize one who had loved life and had liaved in the midst of growing th9ings, so I made him a gardener who had come from a family of gardeners.

"All these traits in Peter GRimm's nature I emphasized in the opening act, in which he was represented in the flesh. Then he sat down in his old armchair before the fire, and when the family came to arouse him to go to bed, they found him dead.

"Now came the hard task of reincarnating Peter in spirit form, when he returns to repair the mistake he made inl ife, upon which depended the happiness of those he had left behind. For weeks I pondered how it couod bebestcontrived, and then I decided that he must walk through the same door, hang his hat on the same peg, and move acrosss the room to the same table--just as the audience had seen him in the preceding act.

"To rehearse the play up to this point and make the company indicate clearly the essentialprelliminary details of the story was not especially difficult. But when it came time to have a spirit form mingle with ten animate beings who always felt its influence, yet remained unaware of its actual presence, the management of the scenes became most perplexing.

"The requirements placed upon Mr. Warfield were very severe. He had to imagine himself returned from the unknown world with an unfulfilled mission to perform. He could not give vent to any emotion whatever; he must typify death. When he stood for thirty-eight minutes without speaking a word as the daily life of the houselhold wnet on around him, yet had to command the unwavering attention of the audience, he gave what I believe to be the greatest exhibition of acting I ever witnessed. During all this time he remained in perfect repose and with eyes fixed. when he left the scene Mr. Warfield would be in a state of utter exhaustion, and would actually have to sit ten minutes in order to bring himself, so to speak, back to life.

"Sensitive as was Mr. Warfield's acting, this illusion of death wcould not be reached or, once reached, be maintained by him alone. The ultimate effect of the character depended upon the relationship of the other characters to it. To insure this illusion I had to develop my actors along peculiar lines. They had to be taught to look at Mr. Warfield, yet not see him. They had tto listen to his speeches, but indicate that they thought his voice was in their imaginations. At one point a little child had to be taught to run to him, throw his arms aroud him, and yet not know that he was there. EWven to the least important character in the play, the actors had to be taught to indicate a negation of all the physical senses.

"To accomplish all this required the most persistent practice. Every detail in the play was so perfectly timed that the movements of my actors were guided by the beat of their pulse. I drilled them until they could have circled around Mr. Warfield blindfolded, and yet not touch him. Until I came to rehearse this peculiar play I never had h alf realized what miracles can abe performed by constant training, when a group of actors are working in perfect unison to accomplish a single purpose or illusion.

"This drilling did not stop witht the people on the stage. Even the scene-shifters had to undergo a course of careful instruction. I required them to wear felf slippers and had the floors covered with heavy matting so that no accidental sound would disturb the spell that had been created.

"Night after night, as long as the play remained before the public, all these precautions were observed until they became very exhausting to every one concerned in the performance. But no accident of any kind occurred during the long run of the play, and I never saw a single indication from the audience that this dangerous nightly traffic with a ghost was other than seriously accepted

"There could be noa better demonstration of the value of pantomime as a part of an actor's equipment that David Warfield's performance of Peter Grimm...."

"...It was very hard to avoid one distressing scene in my own play 'The Return of Peter Grimm,' but I overcame the defect after experimenting with it several weeks. The play deals with the persistent survival of personality, or, as some people would have it, with a ghost. For the denouement of the story it was necessary that the returned spirit of old Peter should become visible to one of the characters. I first invented a seance scene with a woman medium, but in rehearsals it impressed me as ridiculous. Then, after various experiments, none of which quite satisfied me, I hit upon the idea of writing into the play the character of a little child and having him, in his dying delirium, see old Peter in his spirit presence. I was aware that the scene of the child's death would be painful to the audience if I did not soften it, so I introduced into the opening act the effect of a circus passing the house with bands playing and clowns singing, to the delight of the child as he stood at the window. Then, when the death scene was reached at the end of the play, I reproduced all these circus sounds, but softly and from far away, as if they were passing through the little child's disordered mind, and he died smiling and happy. So the effect upon the audience, while deeply pathetic, was neither harsh nor cruel." Belasco was fortunate to have a remarkable child actor to pull off this innovation. He says in the same work, "Little Percy Helton, who acted the child character of Willem in my own play, 'The Return of Peter Grimm,' was...a child of remarkable mental capacity and adaptability, and a little actor of amazing skill and appeal."

WARFIELD IN THE SPIRIT WORLD
by Walter Pritchard Eaton

"The Return of Peter Grimm"-Belasco Theater, October 17,1911

Occasionally David Warfield lays aside "The Music Master" long enough to produce a new play.

He has done so to celebrate the advent of 1911, producing in Boston a new drama signed by David Belasco, called "The Return of Peter Grimm." The present writer dared the east wind to see this new play. His trip to Boston was rewarded by an evening of rare and curious theatrical interest, even excitement. But it was not rewarded by any new revelations in David Warfield's art, nor, indeed, by any very vivid character delineation even along the familiar lines of Warfield's past achievements.

"The Return of Peter Grimm" is interesting rather as a play, almost as a problem in stage management, than as a character picture painted by the actor.

It is tremendously worth doing. But it is not worth doing for two seasons to the exclusion of everything else. Mr. Warfield should have it in a repertory Mr. Warfield is one of those rare players who is greater, or more interesting, than most plays. It is such men who owe it to the world to play many parts, to search out as variously as they can all corners of character and experience.

In his new drama, Mr. Belasco has deserted the realms of realism and of conventional emotion.
Seeking always to be abreast of the hour, he has based a play on the alleged compact between the late William James and another scientist, that whichever died first should try his best to communicate with the living one if individuality persisted after death.

Peter Grimm, played by Mr. Warfield, is a very well-to-do and very amiable and lovable old tulip and orchid grower in a Hudson River town, settled by his Dutch ancestors. He evidently has a heart trouble. His old friend, Dr. Andrew MacPherson, enters into a compact with him similar to that which Professor James is said to have made. At the end of the first act Peter Grimm dies after he has, in his stubborn Dutch way, made his orphan ward, Kathrien, promise to marry his nephew, Frederik, in order to preserve the Grimm name and the Grimm tulip industry.

Now, Kathrien did not love Frederik, who was a no-good fellow anyway, though her loving old guardian, in his pig-headedness, could not realize either fact. You saw tragedy impending for her.
But so does Peter, apparently, as soon as he is dead.

For in the second act he comes back, and the entire act is devoted to his efforts to communicate with the living in order to persuade the girl to break her promise and to follow rather the real dictates of her heart.

This is sheer supernaturalism. And in the manner in which it is put on the stage lies the chief interest and value of the play. It is a fascinating problem, and before the success of its solution the most skeptical and unimaginative must bow.

The supernatural is handled with the least possible use of conventional agencies. Peter Grimm's first entrance, to be sure, is effected on a dark stage, made plausible by a thunder shower outside and the coming of night. The living people in the room gradually have a kind of uneasiness; finally they light a lamp. Peter Grimm stands there in their midst, just as in life.

But they do not see him.

He talks to them and they do not hear him. He cries to them, and they do not heed. He cannot "get across," as he puts it. Only occasionally he seems to affect their thoughts, to stir them to a vague unrest, and once his nephew fancies that he sees him, brushing the thought from his brain with a laugh.

Poor Peter beholds the preparations for the marriage going on in spite of him. He cannot, dead, undo the work he did while quick. He cannot induce Kathrien to break her bitter promise.
But there is in the house a little boy, Willem, the grandson of Peter's old housekeeper. Nobody knows who Willem's father was. His mother would never tell, and Willem was too young when his mother's betrayer left her to remember Willem now has a fever. He is a sensitive child at all times.

Now, in his fevered condition, he is doubly so. It is through him that Peter finally communicates.
Gradually, in a tense hush in the auditorium, Peter's words are felt to reach the boy's ear; gradually he speaks in reply. The doctor comes in, and Kathrien. The child tells them Peter has been in the room. The doctor struggles with him for proof.

Peter urges him to tell who his father was, calling to his memory. The child answers the voice, seeming to the rest on the stage to address the empty air.

Finally he tells those about him that his father was Frederik.

Now whether this was due to Peter or to a sudden rising to the "threshold" of his consciousness (as Professor James would say) of a subconscious memory, is a moot point, very cleverly left by Mr. Belasco as a loophole of escape from any charges that he accepts spirit phenomena as proved. At any rate, the child's confession frees Kathrien from her hateful marriage, and Peter has accomplished his purpose.

The act is more than an hour long. It deals al most entirely with a supernatural situation, which might very well make the skeptic smile. Y et it is staged with such nice regard to what might be called a hypothetical possibility, and it is so replete with theatrical suspense and the emotional poignancy of a suffering soul-the soul of Peter Grimm suffering because he cannot communicate with his loved ones in the land of the living-that it holds the interest almost unflaggingly, after the first few moments of the tiresome Belasco comic relief are over, and for many will undoubtedly be fraught with a strange, uncanny thrill.

With this act, the play, as it at present stands, really ends. The last act is as mawkish as the death of Paul Dombey. Willem dies, and Peter Grimm takes him. It is better that he should be dead, better for all, poor little chap, says Peter. And Willem appears to want to die. Inasmuch as in act one he had been wild with joy at the prospect of a circus, and in act two had been eating cakes to his heart's content, there seemed no real reason either why his spirit should desire death or his body yield to it. But Peter makes his final exit with Willem on his shoulder-a modern Reaper with a frock coat and high hat-while the doctor contemplates a wax replica of the boy stretched out on the couch, after the style of the Eden Musee.

This act is pretty poor stuff. We learn nothing more about Peter Grimm. He evinces no sorrow that, after all, while he has accomplished his purpose in breaking off the marriage, he has not really talked to his loved ones, save through Willem. He tells us nothing of the compensating joys of the life hereafter. Perhaps, indeed, we should not expect that;we should hardly demand even of David Belasco a solution of the mystery of the ages. But at least, since we have been shown Peter's spirit returned to the scene of his life, it would be permissible and interesting to let us a little more into his sentiments and emotions, to make him and not little Willem the leading figure at the close. As the play stands now, it concludes for the audience at the end of act two.

The same setting remains for all three acts, and it is a thing of great beauty-the interior of an old cottage, wainscoted with oak and with oak beams in the ceiling, hung with ancient Dutch portraits, and dominated by an old Dutch chimney piece full of niches and covered with crockery, pipes and a hundred suitable relics. In one corner stands a whatnot bearing bowls of sprouting bulbs. By the fireplace are bundles of shoots wrapped up in sacking -precious plants which have been the source of the Grimm fortune, and really ought to be out in the moist greenhouse or store room! There is an old fashioned square piano. The dining-room, off stage, is seen in its completeness when the door is opened, suggesting not the flies of a theater, but a real house extending off indefinitely. The landscape without has mellow charm. The house within has age and home-likeness and Dutch flavor. And, more important than all, in spite of its brightness and cheer, it is in some subtle way colored and shadow-filled to comport with the mood of supernatural visitation. It is a lovely setting for the lovely personality of David Warfield, and it exactly fits the mood of the drama.

But as this setting stands unchanged, it must be admitted that after a certain point is reached in the play, the character of Peter Grimm, which the actor impersonates, also becomes stationary, even a little monotonous. After its purpose is accomplished of showing the perhaps possible interference in the affairs of the living by one dead, there is no longer any interest in the emotional existence of the spirit visitor. The play degenerates into mawkishness, and loses its potential poetry. We are sure William James would have had something more to say.