Mr. Eugene Walter’s play called “The Easiest Way” is one of the most obnoxious specimens of theatrical trash that have been obtruded on the modern Stage. It depicts a segment of experience in the life of a shallow, weak, and vain prostitute, who makes a feeble attempt to reform but who fails to do so. The significant impartment of that play—in so far as it possesses any significant impartment—is an intimation that “the easiest way” in which a woman can obtain and hold a position on the stage and live in luxury off it is by the sale of her chastity; but that “the easiest way” will, at last, prove to be the hardest, ending in misery and a broken heart. The ethical platitude is supposed to constitute a “moral lesson,” and this disgusting play was proclaimed as instructive and admonitory in its purpose. The assumption of a right and duty to “teach good moral lessons” in the Theatre by causing the public mind to dwell with tolerant familiarity on wholly commonplace and sordid proceedings and experiences of blackguards, rakes, pimps, and harlots, as such, is as stupid as it is impudent, but it has been made by some of the most eminent men and women of the Stage. Lester Wallack produced Boucicault’s tainted drama of “Forbidden Fruit,” and trailed the banner of the noble Wallack tradition in the gutter by doing so; Richard Mansfield, to the end of his life, retained in his repertory the feculent play of “A Parisian Romance” (produced by A. M. Palmer); Mme. Modjeska introduced in our Theatre Mr. Sudermann’s radically pernicious “Heimat” (“Magda”); William and Madge Kendal exploited the “Tanqueray” scandal; that great manager and actor John Hare (one of the loveliest artists that ever graced the Stage) sullied his fair fame by presenting, and attempting to defend, “The Gay Lord Quex”; Belasco brought out “The Easiest Way”—and so it goes. Dispute as to the propriety of presenting such plays is unending. It is not, however, essential to continue that dispute (of which I have long been sick almost to death) in this place: my views on the whole subject of the drama of demirepdom have been explicitly stated in the chapter of this work relating to the play of “Zaza.” When “The Easiest Way” was first made known in New York I wrote and published these words of comment:

It is melancholy and deplorable that he should have lent his great reputation to the support of the vicious play which now disgraces his Stuyvesant Theatre.... No lover of Dramatic Art, no admirer of David Belasco, can feel anything but regret that he should give the authority of his great managerial reputation,—the greatest since Augustin Daly’s death,—and the benefit of his genius and his rich professional resources to the exposition of a drama that cannot do good.... We do not want to see in the Theatre the vileness that should be shunned; we want to see the beauty that should be emulated and loved!

These words expressed my conviction then—and they express my conviction now. And I am encouraged to believe that my old friend (whose productions of “Zaza” and “The Easiest Way” I opposed by every means in my power) has come to my way of thinking on this subject because in a recently published newspaper article I find him declaring: “Art is not confined to the gutter and the dregs of life. Rather, real art has more to do with the beautiful. Perverted and degenerate ideas are the easiest to treat of in literature, the drama, and the stage.”

“The Easiest Way” was produced with vigilant attention to detail. Nothing was forgotten: the rooms shown were reproductions of fact,—from the rickety wardrobe, with doors that will not close and disordered sheets of music and other truck piled on top of it, in the boarding-house chamber, to the picturesque, discreetly arranged disorder of the opulent apartments, the signs of a drunken orgy, and the artfully disclosed and disordered bed. All that stage management could do to create and deepen the impression of reality was done, and the result was a deformity magnificently framed to look like nature,—another example of a thing done perfectly that ought not to have been done at all and one from which I gladly turn away. This was the cast of “The Easiest Way”: