The Return of Peter Grimm

Return of Peter Grimm, The (1911), a play by David Belasco. [ Belasco Theatre, 231 perf.] Peter Grimm (David Warfield) is a kindly old man who persuades his orphan ward Katrien (Janet Dunbar) to marry his nephew Frederick (John Sainpolis) so that the Grimm line may continue. Katrien agrees out of fondness for Peter, although she loves another man and does not care for Frederick. Peter and his friend Dr. MacPherson (Joseph Brennan) have made a compact—that whoever dies first will attempt to come back to earth with a message from the dead. Peter dies and keeps his promise. In death he realizes that he made a great mistake in pressing Katrien to marry Frederick, but on his return he is unable to “get across” to the living. Only Wilhelm (Percy Helton), the ailing little son of his former housekeeper, is able to see and hear him. The others are skeptical of Wilhelm's visions, so Peter has Wilhelm reveal the ugly truth learned in death—that Wilhelm's father is Frederick. The news frees Katrien to marry the man of her choice. Little Wilhelm dies, and Peter takes him on his shoulder and carries him to the realm of the dead, to the accompaniment of the circus music the boy so loved. Although Walter Prichard Eaton insisted the “play degenerates into mawkishness and loses its potential poetry,” most critics and playgoers agreed with Adoph Klauber of the Times, who called the work “a big play, and one which, more than anything its author has done, proclaims him an astonishing genius of the theatre.” Warfield toured with the play for two years and revived it successfully in 1921.