A still from “The Example,” featuring Robards, above, which focused on the 1943 Beaumont race riots. The poster below, promoting Robards’ autobiographical one-woman show “Ain’t That Rich.”
KATE ROBARDS, A SMALL-TOWN girl from Orange, Texas, is living the big-city dream as a writer, stand-up comedian, actor and producer living in the not-so-small borough of Manhattan, New York City.
One would think after living in six major cities across the globe, Robards would have lost her Texas twang. Still, when she walked back into the LUTV studio in February wearing bright yellow suede cowboy boots, it was clear that you can take the girl out of Southeast Texas, but you cannot take the Southeast Texas culture out of the girl.
With a list of accomplishments including having articles written about her work in The Washington Post, winning awards at Stage 32, a social network and educational platform for film, television, and theatre creatives, writing live scripted shows like “The Shorty Awards,” and headlining the Red Room in Austin, growing up, Robards said she never put self-respect on her achievements.
Although, her life may seem to be all glitz and glamour, it wasn’t always that way as she came from a low-income household, which affected her choice of university.
“My mom is a local reporter in Orange,” Robards said. “She doesn’t make a lot of money and is a single mom.”
Coming from humble beginnings, being a Pell Grant student and feeling like a loser, Robards said she found herself as a Cardinal at Lamar University, where she was a part of “literally everything.”
“I was in numerous Lamar commercials, even for the engineering school when I could barely pass math,” she said. “Obviously, I didn’t do everything, but I was very involved. I was involved in any activity that involved free stuff. We love a free shirt.”
Besides featuring in campus commercials and stacking up her Lamar swag, Robards became immersed in the communication department as she wrote for the University Press student newspaper, worked at KVLU, the campus radio station, and at LUTV.
Having a personality as big as hers, and with a face made to be in the limelight, it’s a no-brainer she was also involved in theatre, where she landed the role of Columbia in “The Rocky Horror Show.” She was also in LUTV professor Gordon S. Williams’s film “The Example,” where Robards made her small part as big as she could.
Kate Robards, visited the LUTV studio,left, on a recent visit to campus. Robards, above, performs standup at New York’s famous Apollo Theater.
“When Gordon gave me the dishwashing roll, I respected that, and then he let me be a runner,” she said. “I was like, ‘I am gonna be the best.’”
As they filmed a fight scene, Robards was just supposed to run by and look.
“Well, I said, ‘I’m gonna look, and I’m gonna take a picture of them,’” she said. “I gave myself a whole thing that wasn’t in, and, you know, it was not required or desired, but you gotta milk that part.”
Despite being heavily involved in the Lamar community, Robards said she wasn’t necessarily proud of her school, seeing it as just all she could afford. However, as she moved into the entertainment industry, she began to see it is not always about the name of the university on your degree, but rather the name of the person who earned that degree no matter what school one attends.
“And there was absolutely nothing wrong with going here, but even when I talk to students, sometimes this isn’t our dream, but there’s real, tangible shit to be gained here,” she said.
Robards realized that after landing a theatre fellowship in Washington DC.
“I applied and got the job — shocker,” Robards said. “Then being nosy, I searched through the files of all the applicants to see who I beat out, and it was like Yale, Harvard, all these Ivy League kids, and I went to my boss because she had known me by this point, and I said, ‘Why did you choose me?’” Robards said. “Those little insecurities were bubbling up; how do I stack up against these people? And she goes, at the end of the day, yeah, schools are great. You need the education to apply for this opportunity. But I want to know, will I like the person sitting next to me? Are they competent? At this point, everybody’s competent, so will I like them?”
Although reprimanded for her nosy behavior, Robards realized that even though one can have a degree from the most prestigious school in the world, if you are not likeable, then people are not going to want to be around you.
As Robards got started in her career, she met other former Cardinals, including Evan Wimberly, who Robards met through comedy. The university name was further-reaching than Robards knew, and she began to realize Lamar has helped her succeed in countless ways.
“You get the experience you’re supposed to have, and everything is what you put into it,” she said. “If you for a second discount the people here — the professors, the teachers, your fellow students — then you sure as H-E-double hockey sticks aren’t going to be able to respect people anywhere else.”
Comm administrator Cheryl Fitzpatrick guided Robards towards scholarships as the soon-to-be graduate began prepping to leave the nest. “I was like, ‘Hey, it’s finally happening, I’m graduating,’” Robards said. “Every person who’s helped me should give me graduation money and presents and should help me find a job. I was just asking for jobs, jobs, jobs.”
The choir teacher at Robards’ high school knew someone who’s looking for a nanny. After graduating in 2009, Robards began working for a Grammy Award-winning opera singer. Alongside caring for a child, who was just as important as the artist’s Grammy Award, she said, Robards used her comm skills to write for the singer.
“Because she was a Grammy Award-winning opera singer, I would write her bios,” she said. “I helped with a lot of different things outside of just the task of (nannying). It goes to the thing of, like, are you willing to work always trusting that there’s skills to be learned?”
While at Lamar, Robards anchored the LUTV newscasts, where she said she felt insecure because she could not afford the nicest clothing compared to the students around her. Despite that, Robards knew that instead of becoming a news anchor, she’d rather become an actress who played a news anchor.
Acting before the camera and on stage led Robards to discover she had a talent for making people laugh. Before long she was putting that talent to good use writing and performing stand-up comedy in New York.
Although comfortable in the comedy scene now, her first experience in a comedy club, which happened when she was 21 and living in Beaumont, initially steered her away from the comedian lifestyle.
“I went to this comedy club, and the owner, who is a friend of mine now from Orange, said something about, guys and girls aren’t going to like you,” she said. “It was very discouraging, and I was like, ‘Well, I never want that to happen.’”
LU alum Kate Robards performs her standup
Robards said the club owner implied that girls wouldn’t like her because they would think their boyfriends were trying to have sex with her and that she would be hated by the girlfriends.
“I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa,” Robards said.
Growing up as a conservative Christian and being taught that temptation in any form is a sin, Robards steered clear of the comedy clubs for a while until she found herself in New York, which she said is “the comedy Mecca.” She frequently attended open mics, and before she knew it, she began performing solo shows, and monologues from plays. Robards began getting booked more often, and eventually she found herself performing at the famous Apollo Theatre in Harlem, the iconic home to many Black comedians.
“There were like 1,600 people there, and I went with some other comedian friends who were Black, and I was very new in comedy,” she said. “I got really self-conscious because I asked the Black woman who was running the audition, ‘Should I be doing these jokes here?’ and she goes, ‘Did they get you here?’ and I was like ‘Yes ma’am,’ and she’s like ‘Do those.’”
Being a newer comedian, Robards thought this was her “American Idol” moment. Not the moment where the judges hit the golden buzzer, but the part in the show where they bring on someone only to humiliate them on live television. However, it turned out to be a golden buzzer moment after all, or at least close enough. “I didn’t get booed off, but I have never heard more both boos and laughs in my life,” she said. “Some of my white friends were there who weren’t familiar with the culture. Some of them were looking around like, ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t believe that happened,’ and I’m like, ‘No, it happens to the best.’”
Robards has written for well-known entertainers such as Simu Liu, Pheobe Robinson, Busy Phillips and Kathy Griffin, as well as Stacey Abrams.
The comedian describes herself as someone who “excels at writing about herself in third person omniscient.” She has also written several plays that focus on identity, class and her roots, such as “Mandarin Orange,” a solo play about her journey from Orange to Shanghai, China; “Ain’t that Rich,” a solo play about Robards’ adjustment to having money and realizing what money can’t and can buy; “Madame Pearl,” a four-person play about four lives that intertwine around a “mystic bayou woman;” and her award-winning solo play, “Polyshamory,” about polyamory in her marriage.
the Apollo theater in New York. Robards poses with her fellow LUTV students
“I married this guy who was super rich and also ugly, but at least he had money, and he wanted to become polyamorous,” she said. “My family, like I said, super Christian, and they were like, ‘What has Satan got hold of you?’ Like they were praying for me. But I wrote the play about it, and I had a Broadway producer who wanted to take me up with my dream.”
Robards has since closed that chapter of her life and is now in a monogamous relationship with her boyfriend in their Manhattan apartment. Although Robards enjoys the city, she recently took a short break from The Big Apple and flew back home to connect with her roots and create work that reflects her identity as an individual from Southeast Texas.
“I’ve met a lot of great people in New York and have been collaborating with them, and I’ve been working for companies on things that pay, but it wasn’t fulfilling me on a spiritual, intellectual and emotional level,” she said.
Showbusiness can be a rollercoaster career. Robards said she worked on several projects in New York that never got to see the light of day, and after getting laid off from her last job, she realized that her current situation “was not it.” She wanted to create work that reflected who she was down to her southern core without having to worry about her work being up to industry standards.
“My favorite thing about being here, as opposed to Manhattan or New York City, is that since I’ve been in New York, my brain has become like, here is what the industry wants — this is what you should do,” she said. “Whereas here, you have the freedom to be like, this is what I want to tell a story on. I want to take all of those skills that I have been honing and learning for the past seven years in New York and bring them here, but for the right reasons, because I want to tell a story.
“My identity is so much that of a Southeast Texan, and specifically someone from Orange. I don’t want to get so far removed that I’m repping Southeast Texas and I’m not still able to be an active part of the community here.”
Robards said she thinks of herself as being like Matthew McConaughey who works all over but still has strong ties to his home state.
“I really just have these stories to tell as a person and as an artist, and in some sense, you need to be on the ground floor and connect with what your roots are,” she said.
And that is where Robards is currently in her career. She has given up on chasing the Hollywood dream to tell home-grown stories and then, one day, sell them to Hollywood. However, if anyone from Hollywood is reading this, she said she is just kidding about giving up.
“The future really involves me making projects for myself and the community that I am from and giving back,” she said. “Having worked on the corporate side of the industry, I want to work on getting some grant money so that I can hire people locally in Southeast Texas. That’s a dream of mine, and a goal that I am actively working towards every day.”
From being a college student sitting in the LUTV studio knowing she’d rather become an actress to being a writer, stand-up comedian, actor, producer — and Southeast Texan, through and through — Robards is nothing short of a go-getter. She proves that one may come from humble beginnings, but they do not have to define one’s end.
For more, visit katearobards.com.