Today we’d like to introduce you to Kim Tobin-Lehl.
Kim, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I grew up in Houston and my Mother was a double major at the University of Houston as math and drama with a masters in both disciplines. She was the drama teacher at Marion High School – now Episcopal High School where I did my first acting role in Annie Get Your Gun, as she cast me in a child role so she could spend some time with me while she worked nights and I was hooked! I was side-tracked in High Schools because at the age of eight I started swimming in a USS swimming program and continued through High School so I did not return to acting until college. I have always considered my self a multi-disciplined person, most likely following in the footsteps of my mother.
I spent almost 15 years in New York and Los Angeles where I trained with some of the greatest teachers of our time and worked in some of the most prestigious Obie winning theatre companies and because of my dedication to training and building my craft I ended up honing my teaching craft with some of the most respected professionals in the field. During my time in NYC and LA I also was working a day job in Investment Banking and quickly moved to the top tier of the executive support team where I was supporting the CEO’s and bank presidents and chairman’s giving me extensive access and knowledge to the philanthropic world and how that worked and how fundraising and development circles related to each other and how the world of political and social circles exchanged their support and depended on and negotiated their financial backings in their charitable concerns in the same manner as their business concerns.
So as I spent my evening honing my acting and teaching skills and I spent my days perfecting my business acumen for my future as a theatre company founder and artistic director. I was also working for a few theatre companies in various positions in my years in New York and Los Angeles getting invaluable years of experience in management, fundraising and producing capacity preparing me for the passion of my life – 4th Wall Theatre Company here in my home, Houston, Texas. I returned to Houston in 2005 to take a break and finish my Bachelor’s Degree at the University of Houston.
At the time I cannot say I knew I would stay here – I thought I might return to New York where I understood the landscape and had deep roots in the community both artistically and in the business community. But during my first year back in Houston I meet my husband, Philip Lehl and the course of my life changed. Philip, a Juilliard graduate and former Broadway actor experiencing a strong career in Houston felt at home here and because we fell in love and got married I decided that remaining here and making this our home was a great idea and the best possible move for my career was to start a theatre company where I could put the skill set I had acquired over the years to the best use and then adding his strong ties in the community to mix we had a good shot of things going well.
One of the things most important to us is working for a living wage for artists and we put it at the forefront of our mission and have been on the path to help educate and inspire Houston to lead the nation in shifting the paradigm in how it understands, views and cares for paying its professional artists community around the country. There has been great progress in Houston but we have so far to go. This is not just actors, it is dancers and designers, directors and performers of all mediums who are drastically underpaid and in a number of cases not paid at all. We have a long way to go but are so grateful for all the people who have come on board and are helping us make a difference. I also own a temporary help service that specializes in third-party payroll that was my father’s company and that I worked for when I first returned home and that I bought from him when he retired.
Part of the reason I bought it was for income to supplement Philip and I took little or not income from 4th Wall so that we could put paying our artists above administrative pay increases, and the other part was it was a way for me to offer an inexpensive alternative to small theater companies in Houston to be able to payroll union actor hires for their productions at a much easier payroll model and at a lesser markup than other national models encouraging them to use these professional actors and also encourage them to educate their board members about paying professional artists and foster understanding about the lack of pay across the board for actors and artists and how institutions need to shift their operational bottom lines toward higher budgetary numbers skewed toward artists as opposed to administrative increases or increases in bricks and mortar.
So, I am also a small business owner in the Houston business community and I sever Houston oil companies, energy companies and many others in this service as well. 4th Wall Theatre is in its 8th season and we have seen this company grow and become a wonderful presence in a thriving Houston arts community. We have 4 Houston premiere’s this season and three of the plays were Pulitzer Prize finalists. Season ticket packages are on sale now at discounted prices at 4thwalltheatreco.com. I am the founder and Co-Artistic Director of 4th Wall and I work here and around the city as an actor and director. We have had the pleasure of bringing many talented artists in from New York City to our theatre for Houston audiences, i.e. the awarding winning BEDLAM theatre has been our guest for two productions.
I am the owner of Houston’s Kim Tobin Acting Studio located at Spring Street Studio’s, 1824 Spring Street, also where 4th Wall Theatre is located. I have been teaching Meisner acting for over 15 years have been trained in that approach to acting, as well as others for over 25 years. There are 3 other teachers in my studio and we are very happy to have this professional training available to actors in Houston. My training includes Stella Adler, Gene Frankel, Kevin Kline, Seth Barrish & Lee Brock, Marion Seldes, Larry Moss, Sandy Marshall, Circle In The Square, among others. My acting and directing credits are extensive and span New York City, Los Angeles and of course my home in Houston, TX.
I am currently directing our opening show for 4th Wall’s 2018-2019 Season Jesus Hopped The ‘A’ Train, by Stephen Adly Guirgis which just won the 2018 Lucille Lortel award for Outstanding Revival in New York City for its recent production at the esteemed Signature Theatre Company. I am a proud member of the Houston Artistic and business community and happy that I can contribute to our wonderful community. Thank you for giving me this time to share about the wonderful things I get to be a part of.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Who of us has a smooth road? I also realize I am a person of privilege so I talk about the struggle with that at the forefront of my conversation. I mentioned in my history that I left college at the behest of Edward Albee and that was because I was 26 years old when I met him and he knew I was older and so that was his inclination and sensing that I had talent and so he encouraged me to “get on with it” if you will, being older than everyone else around me he told me I needed to get out to NYC and get started already! LOL!
The reason I was older was because I am an alcoholic and had only gotten sober at 24 years old, so I did not go back to school until I was 24 and had just finished my 2-year degree and was in my first semester at UH when I met him at 26. From 14 years old to 24 years old, my life was not, particularly from 18-24. I am lucky that somehow I managed to survive that time and at the end of that road my family helped me get back on my feet and back in school and have the opportunity to pursue my dreams. But for a long time, I felt like I was behind everyone else and that I had missed my opportunity and that my chance had passed me by.
Over time I realized that all our experiences are important in making us who we are and developing the gifts we have to offer and we don’t miss opportunities necessarily we just walk different roads. I am now almost 29 years sober and am very grateful to Mr. Albee for telling me to leave when I did because if I had stayed and finished my degree I might not have ever left Houston and that would truly have been a missed adventure and the loss of so much knowledge that I am so grateful for that I have now been able to bring back to my home and share. Another tough one for me was about 5 or 6 years ago I went into major grand mal seizures after a year of strange symptoms and finally, they peaked into a major grand mal late one night.
Luckily I was at a wedding with my parents in Vermont so my mother was able to get me to a hospital and it took them a week to stop the seizing. Once I came home it was another few weeks in the neurology wing at Methodist to truly figure it out. Now things are under control and fine, but the meds for the seizures affect my short term memory so I am sure you can imagine that it is quite a challenge as an actor (memorizing lines it NO FUN AT ALL! Lol! – heck it is not fun when it is EASY to memorize them…!?) and sometimes I have to do quite a bit of re-reading to absorb things the way I want for research type jobs. BUT, again that is a small problem to have compared to others and the seizures are all under control.
The final bump in the road I will talk about is a year ago we made a decision to shut down 4th Wall Theatre Company. We did not make this decision because of financial distress or lack of funding, Philip and I did it because of our commitment to artists pay and our unwillingness to take any money out of the budget and/or away from what we were paying artists and move it to pay for more help running the company and our dire need for a Managing Director because Philip and I simply could no longer handle the workload necessary to run the company on our own.
With how successful we were and in order to keep the caliber of work up to what our audiences were used to and what they deserve to see for the money they pay for a ticket and donate in support of us we just felt like alone we could not keep up the hours and work necessary to produce that product. After we closed our audience revolted in the most loving and active manner and the phone rang off the hook with people trying to save us! So many generous offers of support came in, but nothing that would really change the scenario until one person called with a real solution. We needed the funds to hire a true executive who could run things and fundraise and guide us to the next level and that required a huge gift to underwrite true growth and be the guiding light underwriting that belief in our mission and in our work to the community.
Ken Bohan of the Liberty Group came through and we now have Tim Richey as a Managing Director, formerly at The Alley helping us. What we really need is 3 more Ken Bohan’s ($100,000.00 Patron)!?!? Once Ken made his donation we Ken’s $100,000 gift up for a match challenge for the rest of the season and we made it in 3 months. Our patron base had been motivated and we feel very good about the potential for our future and with Tim, at the helm, we are so excited about future as part of Houston’s artistic community and our ability to continue to work for all artists around this great city and state.
Please tell us about 4th Wall Theatre Company.
4th Wall Theatre is special because our work is based on an aesthetic of acting that is based in the Sanford Meisner approach to acting. We hire actors from all realms of acting training but if you work at our theatre or we hire you as an actor or director we make sure in the interview process or as we bring you on board that the primary objective in the work is an attention to truthful acting on stage and an attention to ensemble and relationship work in the storytelling. Sanford Meisner says the objective of great acting is “having a real experience in an imaginary circumstance.” If you come to one of our plays our goal is for you to be swept away and feel like you are part of the play – to have an experience. When we did Dinner With Friends our house manager told us she heard a patron leave say, “It was so real… I actually felt it”. That was a wonderful compliment.
We hope when you are here you experience a level of intimacy and immediacy in the acting and storytelling that is not like what you experience in other theaters. We also pick plays that highlight truly personal work for the most part and storytelling that explores and delves into the human experience in ways that demands you examine your understanding of what it means to actually have a relationship or talk about and understand how you relate to other people about your feeling and issues as they relate you to each other and the world. The plays we pick challenge your access to your own depth and emotional accessibility or commitment. They ask you to look at your humanity. Does this mean we don’t ever do lighter fare, of course not, but even our lighter fare will have deep moral undercurrents if you look for them?
Our work also stands out for its ensemble work. We take great care to have all our actors working together to create an experience where the audience member is easily able to suspend their disbelief of sitting in a dark room and actively engage in the action on stage and lose themselves in the story and the characters in front of them and being “swept away” if you will, into an experience. That can’t happen if one person in a group is not good and does not “fit” in with the rest – it takes the audience member out of the play and they are constantly distracted by that person who does not “fit” (or by bad design elements due to hiring a non-professional designer and cutting corners there). We try very hard to cast strong artists across the board and this reflects back to pay.
We are a professional company not a startup or community theatre and that is why not paying is not acceptable, if you don’t pay it is very easy to make excuses for yourself as to why you had to hire that non-professional artist to fill that role/design because you had a budget constraint and had to hire someone who would work for free or basically nothing and it takes your whole production down. We work very hard to avoid that situation.
There is a lot of wonderful work in Houston and I am by no means saying you can’t see great ensemble work in other theaters I am just saying it is our mission and we do it as our objective before we start and budget and plan it that way before the play is even on the table. Of course, sometimes something does not work perfectly, but if start with the strongest possible quality being the objective before you even begin the process rather than working on quality after everything is already on the table you work from a different kind of thought process about craft and budget formation.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
Hindsight is always an interesting dilemma because if you change things you will lose things before you can gain things so it is not an easy question to answer.
My answer to this is always to find ways to be kinder and more generous at every turn and who knows what avenues would have opened up differently.
Other than that I feel like I have quite a bit to be thankful for.
Pricing:
- Season Ticket Packages now on Sale for 20% off
- Individual Tickets are $17 – $53
Contact Info:
- Address: 1824 Spring Street, STUDIO 101 Houston, TX 77008
- Website: www.4thwalltheatreco.com
- Phone: 832-866-6514
- Email: info@4thwalltheatreco.com
- Instagram: 4thwallhouston
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/4thWallHouston/
- Twitter: @4thwallhouston
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/4th-wall-theatre-company-houstonwww
Image Credit:
Gabriella Nissen
Getting in touch: VoyageHouston is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
