The Drama of an Idealist

...No less revealing is Lewis' report on his experiences directing Harold and Maude, the celebrated 1980 flop that adapted a cult movie to the stage, earning respectful standing ovations for star Janet Gaynor but critical brickbats for everyone else...

...Clurman, to whose spirit the book is dedicated, receives heart-felt praise, for he gave Lewis the principles and stamina to resist the "bastards...

...Strasberg asked in the same steely tones he occasionally inflicted on Sam Wanamaker and Mildred Dunnock...

...The author's knowledge of Harold Clurman should have precluded such misconceptions...

...Besides a desire to challenge the commercial lords of the stage, Clurman and Lewis shared other interests...

...The Teahouse of the August Moon was his greatest financial success, but he gives a particularly warm account of his "true firstborn," William Saroyan's My Heart's In the Highlands, starring Franchot Tone and featuring a kid named Sidney Lumet in a bit part...

...That nursery of the stage drew many of its fundamentals from its precursor but did not initially include the two men whose contrasting temperaments dominate the first half of the memoir: Harold Clurman and Lee Stras-berg...

...More than once, it would appear, Strasberg's emotional violence toward his casts put him in danger...

...Both had academic enthusiasms that impelled them to teach as well as apply their skills...

...Lewis is surely right in thinking that Katie Kelly's admitted preference for Fonzie's Happy Days over Beckett's portends a bleak future for our national culture...

...Lewis also directed the original New York production of Brigadoon, a show whose Scottish settings suddenly had to be made more authentic because promoters decided to take it to England—a most amusing story...

...A chapter entitled "Speaking of Critics...

...Lewis has generally been successful in maintaining his integrity, yet is frank about his occasional lapses, and as a result this reminiscence is more rewarding than most similar productions...

...Often he adopts the tone of a man finishing a long-suspended conversation: "It was certainly stimulating for me to work under you," he tells his former student Robert Brustein, who eventually played dean of the Yale Drama School opposite Lewis' often adversarial and stress-inducing role as chairman of the Acting and Directing Departments...

...At the same time, he was realistic enough to call his younger colleague's attention to the difficulty of reconciling artistic objectives and economic realities—a problem sadly illustrated by the Group Theater's demise, which Clurman described as the victory of conventional show-business finance over loftier aims...

...Here, alongside a generous dollop of anecdotes that keep the tone breezy, is a serious account of the director as idealist...

...Elsewhere, after dredging from his files a particularly damaging comment by John Simon about actress Zoe Caldwell, Lewis writes, "Dear Zoe: Forgive me for repeating Simon's quote...

...But he is prepared to acknowledge only his friend's strengths, contending that they do not redeem the profession as a whole...

...Strasberg eventually came on board and from 1951 until his death in 1982 remained the one name the public associated with the Stanislavski set...

...Yet the "Svengali" of teachers had the last laugh...

...Lewis' informal style lends itself to such recollections...

...At a 1935 dress rehearsal of Melvin Levy's Gold Eagle Guy he reportedly so humiliated Margaret Barker that fellow-actress Ruth Nelson furiously marched across the footlights, swearing, "Now, I'm going to kill him...

...In 1946, he acted the part of the pharmacist who dispenses poison to wife-murderer Charlie Chaplin in Monsieur Verdoux, and his account of the Little Tramp's ostracism by the film community provides a searching vignette of collective degradation...

...Clurman hoped to subsume individual egos in a greater whole, beyond individual eccentricities and willfulness...

...Remembering this angry cry from his childhood, Lewis has adopted it as the leitmotif of his autobiography...

...Although they weren't at all close, young Bobby did often hear the doctor's habitual response to suffered indignities: "The bastards won't let you live...

...No number of remarks about the "jungle" and "the pernicious habit of Broadway" can conceal the exuberance Lewis shows in chronicling his commercial ventures...

...is merely a series of objections that have already been put forward in Lehman Engel's TheCritics...

...From an early involvement with Eva LeGallienne's Civic Repertory, in 1929, to the late, and frustrating, vicissitudes of the Robert Lewis Acting Company, in 1976, the author yearned to be part of an American resident troupe whose members had the technical and emotional range to tackle the international dramatic literature...

...He spent World War II in Hollywood, socializing with the brothers Mann, Ber-tolt Brecht and many other German emigres who populate Christopher Hampton's recent play on the subject, Tales From Hollywood...

...In any event, the antidote to the author's lingering fear of critics has been provided implicitly by the quote inspiring the book's title: To be or not to be: that is the question:/ Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer/The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, /Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, /And by opposing end them...

...What—were—you—trying—to— do...

...He never found the lasting "home" heso badly wanted, but many of his stopping points belong to legend...

...And though Lewis never approached Clurman's illustriously long tenure as the Nation's theater critic, he too had a crack at professional criticism—at this very magazine, in fact, for several months in 1961...

...Strasberg's approach to actors—if not to acting itself —caused Kazan, Crawford and Lewis to overlook him in assembling their faculty in 1947...

...Some years later, following a poorly received Actors' Studio production of The Three Sisters in London, George C. Scott, the Vershinin, "stood up in a rage and advanced on Lee, threatening him with bodily injury" for insisting that the performers'' were lousy and that the fiasco was their fault...

...Calling us "my hearties" or "laddies," he makes us his confidants at once...

...At times, the need to settle an old score draws Lewis into overstatement...

...In September 1931, after a summer at the Actor's Workshop, Lewis began a 10-year affiliation with the Group Theater, where he met Cheryl Crawford and Elia Kazan...

...Together the three of them formed the Actors' Studio in 1947 to promote and develop the ideas of Stani-slavski...

...What Lewis has given us is a fascinating account of a theatrical "taking of arms," executed with an undaunted vigor that might well have pleased Dr...

...Greenberg...

...Not for Lewis the self-indulgent gossip of Harold J. Kennedy's No Pickle, No Performance or the deliberately put-upon tone of Peter Hall's Diaries...

...Lewis left the Actors' Studio in 1948, over what he regarded as Kazan's breach of trust...

...Many fascinating passages recount the attempts of various people to challenge the dictates of this difficult and dogmatic man...

...Like Clurman, Strasberg comes to life in the narrative—without, however, dispelling the first impression he made on Lewis at the Provincetown Playhouse, where he came backstage with Clurman following a performance of a piece called Gods of the Lightning...

...If truth be told," the author writes with admiration, "his exhortations can still be heard reverberating wherever there is evidence of theater, as opposed to show business...

...Above all, the two men shared an ideology: the need to develop a permanent group that could mesh internal emotions with external style...

...Slings and Arrows is a record not only of the names and faces he encountered in a life devoted to the stage but of his own struggle to resist the compromises his profession frequently seems to demand...

...Like Marian Sel-des in The Bright Lights, Lewis spends as much time on the craft and discipline of his art as he does on those he came to know who practice it...

...Lewis was no stranger to the pressures of the motion picture industry, either...

...Between his bouts at various theatrical and academic institutions, the author enjoyed a fine career on the Great White Way...

...Reviewed by Matthew S. Wolf Contributor, Chicago "Tribune," "Plays and Players," "London Theater Monthly" When director Robert Lewis was growing up in Brooklyn during World War I, he lived next door to his family physician, one Samuel Greenberg...

...Nonetheless, too much of the argument seems to rest upon the time-honored fallacy that reviewers do nothing but lie in wait, ready to trounce any inspired creation...

...Thirty-five years afterward his friend's hopes would run aground on the same shoals: The Robert Lewis Acting Company collapsed at the end of its maiden season, a victim of intolerable financial demands and an unnamed incompetent manager...

...By reminding us of a time when repertory was a genuine goal and alternatives to Broadway gleamed with a vibrant passion that did not appear manufactured, Slings and Arrows gives perspective to the ongoing controversy over the management of the Vivian Beaumont at New York's Lincoln Center and to such recent debacles as last fall's return of Julian Beck's Living Theater...