setting, and it is a significant testimony at once to Belasco’s managerial perspicacity and to his skill as a writer and a stage manager that his play of “Grimm” achieved unusual success....
In the days of my youth, when I was a student at the Dane Law School of Harvard College, it was my good fortune to gain the friendship of the erudite lawyer Theophilus Parsons, who was a preceptor there, and to listen to much interesting and instructive discourse by him on many subjects—among them, the Swedenborgian faith, to which he was an absolute and happy adherent. “Death,” he remarked, in expounding to me the tenets of that faith, “is no more than walking from one room into another.” The same thought (which has, of course, been cherished by many persons) seems to have been predominant in the mind of Belasco when he was writing “The Return of Peter Grimm.”...
BELASCO’S “THE RETURN OF PETER GRIMM.”
In drama, whether prose or verse, the device has frequently been used of bringing back to our material world the spirits of persons who have passed out of mortal life, and causing them to pervade the scenes with which they were associated in the body. That device is employed in Belasco’s “The Return of Peter Grimm,” in which David Warfield made his first and, thus far, his only approach to the realm of Imagination [since this passage was written Warfield has appeared, 1915-’16, as Van Der Decken, in a drama by Belasco on the subject of “The Flying Dutchman.”—J. W.]. Peter Grimm, a prosperous, self-willed, kind, good old man, who in the government of his family and the arrangement of his worldly affairs has made serious errors,—the most deplorable of them being the separation of his ward, a docile, affectionate girl named Kathrien, from a youth who loves her and whom she loves, and her betrothal to his nephew, Frederik Grimm, a hypocrite and a scoundrel,—is suddenly stricken dead, of heart disease, and, after a little time his spirit returns to the place which was his earthly home, intent on retrieving those errors, discomfiting the rascal by whom he has been deceived, and making his foster-child happy. Warfield, personating Peter Grimm, first presented him as a mortal, afterward as a spirit. The character,—honest, sturdy, opinionated, worldly-wise, somewhat rough and imperious, yet intrinsically genial,—was correctly assumed and expressed, but the actor’s denotement of spiritual being was neither
REINA BELASCO. MRS. MORRIS GEST
Photograph by White. Belasco Collection.
imaginative nor sympathetic, and it did not create even the slightest illusion.