The Return of Peter Grimm

Return of Peter Grimm, by
David Belasco

Project Gutenberg's The Return of Peter Grimm, by David Belasco
Edited by Montrose J. Moses
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Title: The Return of Peter Grimm
Author: David Belasco Edited by Montrose J. Moses
Release Date: August 29, 2004 [EBook #13319]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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RETURN OF PETER GRIMM ***

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THE RETURN OF PETER GRIMM

[Illustration: DAVID BELASCO]

DAVID BELASCO
(Born, San Francisco, July 25, 1853)
The present Editor has had many opportunities of studying the theatre
side of David Belasco. He has been privileged to hear expressed, by
this Edison of our stage, diverse opinions about plays and players of the
past, and about insurgent experiments of the immediate hour. He has
always found a man quickly responsive to the best memories of the past,
an artist naively childlike in his love of the theatre, shaped by old
conventions and modified by new inventions. Belasco is the one
individual manager to-day who has a workshop of his own; he is
pre-eminently a creator, whereas his contemporaries, like Charles
Frohman, were emphatically manufacturers of goods in the amusement
line.
Such a man is entitled to deep respect, for the "carry-on" spirit with
which he holds aloft the banner used by Boucicault, Wallack, Palmer,
and Daly. It is wrong to credit him with deafness to innovation, with
blindness to new combinations. He is neither of these. It is difficult to
find a manager more willing to take infinite pains for effect, with no
heed to the cost; it is impossible to place above him a director more
successful in creating atmosphere and in procuring unity of cooperation
from his staff. No one, unless it be Winthrop Ames, gives more
personal care to a production than David Belasco. Considering that he
was reared in the commercial theatre, his position is unique and
distinctive.
In the years to come, when students enter the Columbia University
Dramatic Museum, founded by Professor Brander Matthews, they will
be able to judge, from the model of the stage set for "Peter Grimm,"
exactly how far David Belasco's much-talked-of realism went; they will
rightly regard it as the high point in accomplishment before the advent
of the "new" scenery, whose philosophy Belasco understands, but

whose artistic spirit he cannot accept. Maybe, by that time, there will
be preserved for close examination the manuscripts of Belasco's
plays--models of thoroughness, of managerial foresight. The present
Editor had occasion once to go through these typewritten copies; and
there remains impressed on the memory the detailed exposition in "The
Darling of the Gods." Here was not only indicated every shade of
lighting, but the minute stage business for acting, revealing how wholly
the manager gave himself over to the creation of atmosphere. I
examined a mass of data--"boot plots," "light plots," "costume designs."
Were the play ever published in this form, while it might confuse the
general reader, it would enlighten the specialist. It would be a key to
realistic stage management, in which Belasco excels. Whether it be his
own play, or that of some outsider, with whom, in the final product,
Belasco always collaborates, the manuscripts, constituting his
producing library, are evidence of his instinctive eye for stage effect.
The details in the career of David Belasco are easily accessible. It is
most unfortunate that the stupendous record of his life's
accomplishment thus far, which, in two voluminous books, constituted
the final labour of the late William Winter, is not more truly reflective
of the man and his work. It fails to reproduce the flavour of the
dramatic periods through which Belasco passed, in his association with
Dion Boucicault as private secretary, in his work with James A. Herne
at Baldwin's Theatre, in San Francisco, in his pioneer realism at the old
New York Madison Square Theatre, when the Mallory Brothers were
managers, Steele Mackaye was one of the stock dramatists, Henry
DeMille was getting ready for collaboration with Belasco, Daniel
Frohman was house-manager and Charles Frohman was out on the road,
trying his abilities as advance-man for Wallack and Madison Square
successes. Winter's life is orderly and matter-of-fact; Belasco's real life
has always been melodramatic and colourful.
His early struggles in San Francisco, his initial attempts at playwriting,
his intercourse with all the big actors of the golden period of the
'60's--Mr. Belasco has written about them in a series of magazine
reminiscences, which, if they are lacking in exact sequence,