Author: Eugene Walter
Release Date: July 29, 2004 [EBook #13050]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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EBOOK the easiest way ***
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[Illustration: Eugene Walter]
(Born, Cleveland, Ohio, November 27, 1874)
When questioned once regarding “The Easiest
Way,” Mr. Eugene Walter said, “Incidentally,
I do not think much of it. To my mind a good play
must have a tremendous uplift in thought and purpose.
’The Easiest Way’ has none of this.
There is not a character in the play really worth
while, with the exception of the old agent. The
rest, at best, are not a particular adornment to society,
and the strength of the play lies in its true portrayal
of the sordid type of life which it expressed.
As it is more or less purely photographic, I do not
think it should be given the credit of an inspiration—it
is rather devilishly clever, but a great work it certainly
is not.”
Such was not the verdict of the first night audience,
at the Stuyvesant Theatre, New York, January 19, 1909.
It was found to be one of the most direct pieces of
work the American stage had thus far produced—disagreeably
realistic, but purging—and that is the test
of an effective play—by the very poignancy
of the tragic forces closing in around the heroine.
Though it is not as literary a piece of dramatic expression
as Pinero’s “Iris,” it is better
in its effect; because its relentlessness is due,
not so predominantly to the moral downgrade of the
woman, as to the moral downgrade of a certain phase
of life which engulfs those nearest the centre of it.
The play roused a storm of comment; there were camps
that took just the stand Mr. Walter takes in the opening
quotation. But the play is included in this collection
because its power, as a documentary report of a phase
of American stage life, is undeniable; because, as
a piece of workmanship, shorn of the usual devices
called theatrical, it comes down to the raw bone of
the theme, and firmly progresses to its great climax,—great
in the sense of overpowering,—at the very
fall of the final curtain.
