Levi Kreis: Embrace What Makes You Different

by Tom DeTitta

Just a stone’s throw from the rural Appalachian town where he grew up, actor-singer Levi Kreis captivated an SETC keynote audience in Knoxville with the story of the long and winding road he has followed, from teenage gospel singer and self-taught child prodigy pianist to Tony Award-winning Broadway actor and widely acclaimed composer. The message he shared at the 2019 SETC Convention articulated the discoveries he made along the way.

“Own your corner of the world,” he advised his SETC audience. “What makes you different makes you a commodity.”

Choosing the Road

In Oliver Springs, TN, Levi Kreis’ corner of the world when he was a child, Sunday mornings meant loading up the family station wagon and heading off to church. A few too many people piled into the ‘88 Buick Century for his grandmother’s tastes, and she didn’t hesitate to let the others know: “It’s so crowded in here, you can’t cuss a cat without getting hair in your mouth.”

After church, he fondly recalls having three generations of family gather around the kitchen table for Sunday lunch, with the gospel songs that would influence his career still in his ears. In his ears, too – making their way to his head – were the admonitions of the preacher who made life simple enough: there was good and there was evil, the narrow road and the broad road. The only question was, which one were you going to choose?

Life was familiar in the rural Appalachian foothills. You’d have to drive 30 miles to Knoxville to find a stranger. But one day, five-year-old Levi Kreis came home from his kindergarten graduation and began spontaneously playing Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance on his mother’s old piano, using both hands while his brother pumped the pedals because he couldn’t reach them. Just like that, everything changed.

By the time he was 12, Levi was touring with a Southern gospel band. When he was 14, his parents arranged for him to travel with family friend and famous rockabilly music star Brenda Lee. For most of his childhood, he had been composing classical music. One day, his mother made a call to a university in Nashville.

“I was 14, 15 maybe, and she held the phone over the piano while a professor at Vanderbilt University was on the other line, and she said, ‘You need to hear this kid,’” said Kreis. “Because of that, Vanderbilt University offered me a full scholarship for classical piano as a sophomore in high school.”

Kreis had been admitted to the prestigious precollege program at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music. “My grandmother and grandfather would drive me three hours to Nashville to do my classes and be back home to be in bed by midnight, every Monday and Thursday for three years,” Kreis said.

The highway miles paid off. By 2010, Kreis was working on Broadway, where his portrayal of Jerry Lee Lewis in the musical Million Dollar Quartet earned him a Tony Award and high praise from Lewis himself: “He told me, ‘Son, lots of people have tried to play me. But you’re the best.’ ”

Over the years since then, Kreis has continued to perform while also releasing five albums. His songs have been featured in The Vampire Diaries, Sons of Anarchy and other primetime television shows. He has appeared on Late Night with David Letterman, The View and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, to name a few. His career has been one most aspiring actors/musicians/songwriters could only dream of.

But the voices in his head that began with the Sunday morning preacher – voices of admonition that morphed into reprobation, which in turn instilled self-doubt and even self-loathing – would follow him throughout his storybook career, each time assuming a different message but always with essentially the same critical and unforgiving voice. Each time, it felled him temporarily.

However, each time, he arose from the largely self-inflicted trials and tribulations with a new and enlightened perspective that allowed him to authentically move forward with more passion and with more confidence in who he was as an artist and as a person. It was that collective wisdom born of struggle that he shared in his convention keynote.

Damnation in Tennessee

The first battle he faced was the most fundamental and set the stage for future struggles. Whatever deity his hometown preacher was representing allegedly saw homosexuality as a journey down the broad road that led to eternal damnation.

“I knew at eight years old that I was different,” Kreis said. “I was told that that difference makes me an abomination to God. So, I decided in eighth grade that I would start going to my girlfriend’s church because they had a program for people like me. In eighth grade, behind my parents’ back, I checked myself into what they call conversion therapy, and I had my sessions, my workbooks, my textbooks, my support groups all constantly telling me that fundamentally I was broken. For six years I did this, right up until my first year of college.”

As he settled into college at a conservative Southern Baptist university in Nashville, he began looking at the scripture different ways, wondering if a loving God really detested him as much as he was made to believe. The articulation of these questions was seen as evidence of his homosexuality and caused an uproar both in his academic life and in his professional career. At the time, he had already been signed to a lucrative gospel music contract.

“I was dropped from the record label, released from school, outed to campus, and told that everything that I had worked for and dreamed about was not going to happen,” Kreis said. “That’s a really big ‘no.’ Do you realize now how easy it would be to define myself by that?”

New World of Musical Theatre

Looking to start over, he went to Los Angeles, bringing with him a heartfelt desire to know onstage, and honestly embrace, the characters of musical theatre. In a land of skinny jeans and guarded personas, he wore cowboy boots, Wrangler jeans and a pearl-snap shirt. With an unapologetic regional accent and a persona exuding East Tennessee friendly, once again, he was different from everybody else.

With no resume or headshot, at his very first audition, he was No. 169 in a cattle call for the national tour of Rent. After five callbacks, he somehow managed to land one of the lead roles. His unimaginable good fortune didn’t stop there.

“At my second audition, I got the lead in a rockabilly family drama, Don’t Let Go, that won several film festivals,” Kreis said.

“In my third audition, I was cast in the role of Fenton Meeks in Bill Paxon’s directorial debut, a movie called Frailty. My fourth audition was my very first musical that I workshopped from the ground up, all the way from Village Theatre in Seattle to Kennedy Center.”

But then, that same voice in his head, like the one that had caused him to cast doubt on who he was as a person, called into question who he was as an artist. He looked around and saw his fellow cast members in Rent with graduate degrees.

“They weren’t afraid to display their elitist attitude toward someone who they felt honestly didn’t earn or deserve it, and I remember letting that make me feel so small, and I let it eat away at me, feeling so incredibly insecure about what was raw instinct,” he said.

The key to achieving success in acting – his own self-taught MFA program – was simply this: “I understood that if I was creating a character, if I didn’t believe it, nobody else would. I knew how to find the path to honesty.”

Even as he came to that realization, he struggled with his sense of worth – and that unhinged his performance. He was fired a month-and-a-half into the contract for Rent. Insecurity continued to dog him through his subsequent successes, even through winning his Tony Award, which he hid in the closet because he felt he wasn’t worthy of it.

Levi Kreis answers a question from an audience member after his keynote presentation.

Caitie McMekin

Secrets to Success

While others can fall victim to their own insecurities again and again, Kreis was able to transcend that which attempted to defeat him and learn from the experience. He shared “Secret No. 1” with the audience: Choose the story you want to define you.

“What story are you choosing to define yourself?” he asked the audience. “Is it something your mom said, something your dad said? Is it based on the few failures that you’ve had? You get to choose what it is, because for every story that defines you and makes you small, I guarantee you can find five stories in your life that make you big.”

The second secret he shared was also based on embracing who you are in a manner that helps you succeed in the industry.

“What makes you different makes you a commodity,” he said. “How many times do we sit on the other side of that table with producers who we think know everything. We think that the casting directors are omniscient, omnipresent, that they’re this deity that is just waiting for us to be worthy of that job. That’s so not true. We need to spend less time worrying about being what we think they want us to be and instead take the journey inside our own soul and understand our craft from the most authentic, honest perspective possible.

“There was a period of time where I definitely hid who I was, where I’m from,” he continued, referring to his Eastern Tennessee, Appalachian background. “Also, the big cities have their own judgments about my kind of people, that’s true. But it wasn’t until I owned who I was that I proved to other people that, I’m sorry, but y’all city folk can’t do country characters like a country actor can.”

Along the way, one of the other pitfalls he had to navigate was the lure of drugs and alcohol. He is now 10 years sober.

“I let my substance abuse run me deeply in the ground,” he said. “I am a firm believer that substance abuse is – I mean, whether it’s overeating or drugs – an expression of our lack of self-worth.”

Substance abuse would be tragic enough were it to only affect “drunks” and “druggies” – those who fell through the cracks of society and whose only solace was the bottle, the line, the pill or the needle. But, as Kreis pointed out, substance abuse attacks those with great talent and great potential, completely undermining both.

“I find so many people who are prone to addiction have this weird little genius, so that if they would turn their power toward themselves rather than against themselves, the things they would accomplish would be out of this world,” he said.

This tragedy is furthered by Hemingway-esque myths of the excesses of the artistic lifestyle. “You have longevity when you realize that you do not have to suffer to make art,” Kreis said.

Claiming His Corner of the World

The next challenging journey in Kreis’life is reestablishing his place at the kitchen table of his youth. In the past, the destructive voice in his head told him that to succeed as an artist, you have to live in a big city and that nothing of merit comes out of rural, out-of-the-way places like Oliver Springs, TN. But recently, Kreis made the decision to leave New York, realizing that, for him, the opposite was true.

“Nowadays, you can live anywhere and be an artist,” he said. “I might have been home only three months last year, but you can still do what you do anywhere. For me,coming back home was a personal decision because I felt like I wouldn’t like who I was if I spent five more years in New York. I felt like I was becoming jaded, guarded,cynical – and I valued my culture here.

“I knew that becoming this cynical transplant from New York was not going to help me in my craft, especially once I realized what makes you different makes you a commodity. Looking at a resume for Southern characters and knowing that people come to me for those roles, I don’t want to lose that. If I stay rooted in that, I’m always going to do it better than the next New Yorker who thinks they can.”

During the question-and-answer session following his talk, Kreis was asked questions about his early life that he could have used as an opportunity to speak poorly about, and avenge his treatment by, the people who had done him harm, whether they be those adhering to a certain brand of religious doctrine or those who condescendingly mocked his regionalism or lack of academic credentials.But again and again, his message was one of forgiveness and acceptance, as though embracing a truer manifestation of the love, goodness and charity at the core of the belief system that had been perverted by the imperfect messenger of his youth.

“I believe most people are good, and I believe that when we know better, we do better,” he said. “This is the hard part: I believe if I am going to believe in diversity,then I have to honor their journeys as well, and for me it was about the commitment to show back up at home; it was about learning to love when it wasn’t easy.”

Especially transcendent was the third and final secret he shared with the audience at his keynote address, the idea of artists letting go of their egos and seeing themselves as a medium.

“Remember, please, that you are a conduit for something that is greater than yourself,” he said. “There’s truth in what you’re doing, so your job is to find it, to embody it, and to allow it to flow through you in that character. And I think as we grow, we surrender to that process.

“I’ve seen a lot of great performances that are very cerebral, very good, but I’ve only seen actors move a group of people when they have gotten out of their own way and realized that what they are is a vessel,a conduit for something that is greater than themselves, because art is not only activism,art is healing, art is love, art is the evolution of our soul. If you don’t account for the soul aspect of what you do, you’re not evolving to the degree that is your potential.”