Robert Lewis (actor) - The Group Theatre

The Group Theatre

In 1931, Lewis became one of the 28 original (and youngest) members of New York's revolutionary Group Theatre. Formed by Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg and producer Cheryl Crawford, The Group was an ensemble of passionate young actors, directors and writers who came together to explore the inner processes of theatre craft.

Lewis and other members of the Group, such as Stella Adler and Elia Kazan, were proponents of a new form of acting based on the techniques of Russian director, Constantin Stanislavski. They believed the Stanislavski System, first taught in America in the 1920s by former members of the Moscow Art Theatre, Richard Boleslavski and Maria Ouspenskaya at the American Theatre Laboratory where Clurman and Strasberg had studied, resulted in a more truthful, more believable, and therefore more powerful stage performance than could be accomplished with more seemingly external techniques common at that time.

Lewis appeared in several original Group Theatre productions in the 1930s including Sidney Kingsley's Pulitzer Prize-winning Men in White and Clifford Odets' plays Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing!, Paradise Lost and Golden Boy.

Lewis summered at Pine Brook Country Club in Nichols, Connecticut. Pinebrook is best known for becoming the summer home of the Group Theatre (New York). Some of the other artists who summered there were; Elia Kazan, Harry Morgan, John Garfield, Lee J. Cobb, Will Geer, Clifford Odets, Howard Da Silva and Irwin Shaw.

As in any artistic endeavor, differences in translation and emphasis between the Russian Stanislavski System, and what eventually came to be known as The Method, were debated vigorously in the Group. In the summer of 1934, Stella Adler returned from a trip to Paris where she had worked privately with Stanislavski and directly challenged Lee Strasberg's approach, deepening tensions which led to Strasberg's departure from the Group in 1937. In later years, Lewis held that Strasberg's Method, while valid in its particulars, was a misrepresentation of Stanislavski because it emphasized only some parts of Stanislavski's theory. (See Method — Or Madness?, below)

Despite the Group's success, internal disagreements, the lure of Hollywood and financial issues began to take a toll and, by late 1936, production was suspended. Officially released from Group obligations, many of the members, including Lewis and Group founder Harold Clurman, went off to join other Group members already in Hollywood.

In April 1937, Lee Strasberg and Cheryl Crawford resigned as directors of the Group. A year later, however, Robert Lewis and Elia Kazan returned to New York to restart Group workshops and The Group Theatre Studio resumed with fifty actors chosen from four hundred who auditioned. Lewis, Kazan and Sanford Meisner were the principal teachers.

That same year, Harold Clurman returned from Hollywood to stage the Group's production of Clifford Odets' Golden Boy, which became its most successful play. Robert Lewis was cast as Roxy Gottlieb, the prizefight promoter. Lewis later maintained that he had been miscast in the original production, though he assumed a more satisfying role as director of his own successful production of Golden Boy at the St. James Theatre in London, in 1938.

While in London, Lewis studied with Michael Chekov, an actor whose work he admired and whom Stanislavski considered one of the foremost interpreters of his theories. At Chekov's studio in Devonshire at Dartington Hall, Lewis further shaped his understanding of Stanislavski's techniques, or "method", as it was informally known in America.

The following year, Lewis made his Broadway directorial debut with a critically successful production of William Saroyan's My Heart's in the Highlands (1939).