Bobby Lewis

Sep 21

Learn the half of the craft that does not flatter you.

Life and work

Bobby Lewis (1909–1997), Robert Lewis on a program and Bobby to everyone in the American theater, was born in Brooklyn and came up through music before acting. He joined Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre in 1929 and was one of the original members of the Group Theatre in 1931, acting in Men in White, Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing! and Golden Boy. He studied with Michael Chekhov in England. In 1947 he founded the Actors Studio with Elia Kazan and Cheryl Crawford and taught its first advanced class. He left the next year and directed Brigadoon, The Teahouse of the August Moon, Witness for the Prosecution, Jamaica and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. He ran his own workshop, led acting and directing at the Yale School of Drama until 1976, and died in New York in 1997.

Approach and technique

Lewis spent his life arguing one point. Stanislavski asked for an inner life and an outer one, and the American narrowing of that work to private feeling threw away half the instrument. His 1958 lectures, published as Method – or Madness?, made the case in public, to a profession that did not entirely want to hear it from one of the people who built the room.

What he wanted was an actor who could do both jobs on the same night. Feel it, and be heard in the last row. Mean it, and speak verse. He had no patience for the idea that clarity is a betrayal of truth, and none for ornament with nothing underneath it either. Form was not the opposite of honesty to him. It was the part of the work that most actors quit before reaching.

A founder who kept his distance

You can see the argument in his biography. He was inside the Group Theatre when the American branch of this work was invented, and inside the Actors Studio at its founding, with Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and Karl Malden in his first advanced class. Then he left, over the direction the place was taking, and spent the rest of his life teaching and directing elsewhere.

That distance is what makes him useful to you. He was not a critic of the Method from outside it. He was one of the people who carried it into the country, saying that what came back out was thinner than what went in. When a man who helped build a house tells you the roof leaks, the report is worth more than the same words from a stranger.

Why half a craft fails in the fourth week

A technique built only on private feeling gets you through an audition and a first read. It fails in a run. Eight shows a week is a question about repeatability, and feeling is not repeatable on demand. What repeats is structure: the action you are playing, the shape of the speech, the breath that supports it, the physical life you built on purpose.

The reverse failure is just as common and easier to hide. An actor with beautiful diction and no private stake gives a performance that is correct and empty, and the audience, who cannot say why, checks their phone at intermission. Lewis was after the version where both are true, and he was blunt that the second half takes years of unglamorous work on voice, speech and form.

So what is the test? Take a scene you can already play truthfully in a small room. Now play it in verse, or at speed, or to nine hundred seats, or in a mask. If everything that was alive in it dies the moment a formal demand arrives, the truth you had was fragile, and it was conditional on comfort. If the form stays and the life goes out, you have technique with nobody home. Both are half a craft. Both are common in people who have been training for years.

There is an economics to this that no school likes to say out loud. Inner work produces visible results in weeks, which makes it easy to sell and easy to grade. Voice, speech, verse and physical form take seasons, and they look like homework. A student choosing a class by how fast it feels transformative will pick the half that flatters, every time. Lewis’s whole argument is that the profession chose the same way, and called the result a method.

Applications for actors

Audit which half you avoid, and be honest about which one it is. If your instinct is to defend your private truth against any note about clarity, that is the tell. If you can be heard perfectly and cannot say what you personally want in the scene, that is the other one. Put the avoided half on your calendar as weekly work, not as a someday intention.

Rehearsal exercise

Take eight lines you know well and play them three times under increasing formal demand. First as you would in a small room, close to a partner. Second at full volume to an imagined last row, with the same intention and no shouting. Third as verse, or in a set rhythm you decide in advance, still meaning every word.

Record all three. Listen without watching. On the second pass, ask whether the want survived the volume or whether you started announcing. On the third, ask whether the rhythm carried your meaning or replaced it.

Then reverse the exercise. Begin with the formal version and let the private life come in underneath it without loosening the form. Most actors find one direction much harder, and the harder direction names their missing half. Keep the recording and repeat the exercise in a month with new text. You are training the join between the two halves, which is the thing Lewis said the training was dropping.

Books and further study

Read Method – or Madness?, published in 1958, for the argument in his own voice, and Advice to the Players from 1980 for the teaching set out plainly. Slings and Arrows: Theater in My Life, published in 1984, is the memoir, and it puts the argument back among the people and productions that produced it. Read the first and last together and you will see a man defending something he helped start.