The Return of Peter Grimm | Page 3

its historical significance, but
merely to give depth and mellowness to such an ecclesiastical picture
as Knoblauch's "Marie-Odile." He has spent whole nights alone in the
theatre auditorium with his electrician, "feeling" for the "siesta"
somnolence which carried his audience instantly into the Spanish heat
of old California, in "The Rose of the Rancho;" and the moving scenery
which took the onlooker from the foot-hills of the Sierras to the cabin
of "The Girl of the Golden West" was a "trick" well worth the
experiment.
Thus, no manager is more ingenious, more resourceful than David
Belasco. But his care for detail is often a danger; he does not know
fully the value of elimination; the eye of the observer is often worried
by the multiplicity of detail, where reticence would have been more
quickly effective. This is the Oriental in Belasco. His is a strange blend
of realism and decorativeness.
"A young man came to me once," he said to me, "with the manuscript
of a new play, which had possibilities in it. But after I had talked with
him awhile, I found him preaching the doctrines of the 'new' art. So I
said to him, 'My dear sir, here is your manuscript. The first scene calls
for a tenement-house set. How would you mount it?'"
He smiled, maybe at the recollection of Gordon Craig's statements that
"actuality, accuracy of detail, are useless on the stage," and that "all is a
matter of proportion and nothing to do with actuality."
"I felt," Mr. Belasco continued, "that the young man would find
difficulty in reconciling the nebulous perspectives of Mr. Craig with
the squalor of a city block. I said to him, 'I have been producing for
many years, and I have mounted various plays calling for differing
atmospheres. I don't want to destroy your ideals regarding the 'new art',
but I want you to realize that a manager has to conform his taste to the
material he has in hand. I consider that one of the most truthful sets I
have ever had on the stage was the one for the second act of Eugene
Walter's 'The Easiest Way'. A boarding-house room on the top floor
cannot be treated in any other way than as a boarding-house room. And
should I take liberties with what we know for a fact exists in New York,

on Seventh Avenue, just off Broadway, then I am a bad producer and
do not know my business. I do not say there is no suggestion in realism;
it is unwise to clutter the stage with needless detail. But we cannot
idealize a little sordid ice-box where a working girl keeps her miserable
supper; we cannot symbolize a broken jug standing in a wash-basin of
loud design. Those are the necessary evils of a boarding-house, and I
must be true to them'."
One will have to give Mr. Belasco this credit, that whatever he is, he is
it to the bent of his powers. Had he lived in Elizabeth's day, he would
have been an Elizabethan heart and soul. But his habit is formed as a
producer, and he conforms the "new" art to this habit as completely as
Reinhardt Reinhardtized the morality play, "Everyman," or Von
Hofmannsthal Teutonized "Elektra."
"The Return of Peter Grimm" has been chosen for the present
collection. It represents a Belasco interest and conviction greater than
are to be found in any of his other plays. While there are no specific
claims made for the fact that PETER materializes after his death, it is
written with plausibility and great care. The psychic phenomena are
treated as though real, and our sympathy for PETER when he returns is
a human sympathy for the inability of a spirit to get his message across.
The theme is not etherealized; one does not see through a mist dimly.
There was not even an attempt, in the stage production of the piece,
which occurred at the Belasco Theatre, New York, on October 17, 1911,
to use the "trick" of gauze and queer lights; there was only one supreme
thing done--to make the audience feel that PETER was on a plane far
removed from the physical, by the ease and naturalness with which he
slipped past objects, looked through people, and was unheeded by those
whom he most wanted to influence. The remarkable unity of idea
sustained by Mr. Belasco as manager, and by Mr. Warfield as actor,
was largely instrumental in making the play a triumph. The playwright
did not attempt to create supernatural mood; he did not resort to natural
tricks such as Maeterlinck used in "L'Intruse," or as Mansfield
employed in "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." He reduced what to us seems,
at the present moment, a complicated explanation of a psychic
condition to its