While some may opt to pass the time after a stressful day by stopping at a bar for a drink or cozying up in front of the television, Judge Christine Weems of the 281st Civil District Court does no such thing.
Instead, she partakes in elements of those two things — the social aspect of being around friends and the love of performing arts — by working with her own theatre company, Cone Man Running Productions. Some well-known names in the Houston legal community also find refuge there, among them former Harris County district judges Elizabeth Ray and Abigail Anastasio, current Harris County district judges Hilary Unger and Natalia Cornelio, Lanier Firm senior attorney Patrice McKinney and Susman Godfrey associate Alexandra Foulkes Grafton. Cone Man Running Productions, named after the goal of staying ahead of a marathon’s “cone man”— the guy charged with collecting all the cones after a race starts — is an outlet for Weems and other lawyers to decompress and network, she said.
“The great thing with this is that we’re all coming together to create art, to do a play. While in between, you can talk about the law because we all relate to it because we’re all doing it,” Weems said in an interview with The Texas Lawbook.
Weems’ new show, put on by a 13-person ensemble cast, is slated to open Feb. 15, The Five Minute Mile, co-directed by Weems and her friend Ruth S. McCleskey, is a series of 32 short plays and monologues, but attendees will see 20 five-minute plays each night: 10 chosen in advance and 10 chosen by the audience. The plays range from comedies to dramas about all sorts of quirky characters, covering serious topics like the realities of war and more lighthearted ones about workplace antics and love at first sight.
The plays, which will run through March 1, can be seen at the former Harris Moving & Storage Building at Spring Street Studios in Sawyer Yards.
Weems’ love of acting dates back to law school, when she landed a spot as an extra in the cult classic comedy “Office Space” in 1999, the year before she graduated from South Texas College of Law. There, you can see a 22-year-old Weems in the background typing on a massive computer in her cubicle or trying to stay awake as smug boss Bill Lumbergh (Gary Cole) drones on about timesheets to Initech employees. That experience paved the way for future roles as an extra, milling about in the background of “Law and Order” episodes and as a restaurant-goer in Tina Fey’s “30 Rock.” Her TV career culminated with a nationwide ITT Tech commercial called “Mondays,” where she played tech guru Stacy. Clad in a yellow button-down shirt, a vibrant Weems smiles at coworkers and swoops in to solve their tech problems, with coworkers and bosses signing her praises. She ends the 40-second ad with her one spoken line of — “I love Mondays!”— a line that Weems said she now finds somewhat “cringy.”
In her 24-year legal career, Weems has grown from a young litigation associate at a Houston personal injury firm to an experienced lawyer who launched her own boutique, Weems Law Firm, in October 2016. Through all the professional changes, including her ascent to the bench, Weems has looked to theater as an outlet, a place where she reads scripts rather than pleadings and trades the black robe for a director’s hat. She launched Cone Man Running in 2011.
The skills required to be a successful courtroom advocate overlap quite a bit with those required of thespians, Weems said.
Lessons learned through sharpening her improvisation skills helped her overcome the fear of appearing to make a mistake or saying the wrong thing in court as a young trial lawyer.
“In improv, everybody looks stupid. You’re going to say something, and it’s either people are going to laugh at you, or they’re not, and it falls flat. If it does, you just keep going.” Weems said. “Same thing in the practice of law. It’s a hard lesson for people to learn that, to just…not worry about looking stupid.”
Theater, though, has remained a mainstay in Weems’ life for decades and even has brought her some of her closest friends like fellow lawyer Eddie Rodriguez, who runs his own trial boutique in Houston, and her husband, Michael Weems, an actor and playwright. In 2007, the three friends were board members of theater company Phare Play Productions in Manhattan. Life eventually brought each of them from New York to the Houston area. In 2011, they all joined forces to form Cone Man Running Productions in collaboration with three other board members, Kacie Adams, Kelsey Finstad, and Josh Baker.
The company is filled with Weems’ lifelong friends, some in the legal field, some not. Weems, who also serves as an adjunct professor at the University of Houston Law Center, sometimes recruits law students who have an interest in theater to audition. While Cone Man Running doesn’t exclusively focus on law-based plays, Weems likes to add at least one into each theater season.
“I always try to do a legal play because it’s an easy way to gently ease my lawyer friends who have always been interested in theatre to get a chance to act,” Weems said. “If it’s a law-related play, it’s a little bit less of a stretch for the new actors. And there are some amazing law-related plays.”
Last summer, the company performed Agatha Christie’s classic Witness for the Prosecution. The courtroom drama captivated audiences and was staffed by an exclusive all-lawyer cast. Before that, in the summer of 2022, its all-lawyer cast worked together on Twelve Angry Jurors. Judge Weems directed both.
Matt Mendoza, an attorney who practices personal injury law in Houston and a frequent actor in Cone Man Running Productions plays, told The Lawbook the judge opened his eyes to a new world of acting and community.
“I met [Judge Weems] for the first time in 2019,” he said. “The first job that I had as an associate attorney, my boss was acting in her play, and I think they were, like, a person short, and of course, my boss was like, ‘Hey! I have an associate that can come along.’ Ever since then, it seems like every year, I’ve been in at least one of her plays,” Mendoza said.
Over the years, he has enjoyed the process of developing the characters he portrays. He recalls the work he put into his character’s cockney accent in Witness for the Prosecution.
“[The character] talks with a very grouchy, angry voice with overaccentuated syllables,” Mendoza said. “It bugs the heck out of my wife, but the audience loved it. It would get a lot of laughs throughout the performance…and friends who knew me and how I speak were like, ‘Oh my God, he doesn’t sound anything like that!’”
He says the skills he’s learned on the stage have made him a better public speaker, both in the courtroom and when talking to clients.
Barbara Stalder, former judge of the 280th District Court in Harris County, told The Lawbook that if it weren’t for the guidance and encouragement of Weems’ whom she counts as one of her closest friends, she would have likely never pursued this “amazing world of theater.” Both Stalder and Weems started their judicial careers in January 2019.
“She’s been my mentor from the outset,” Stalder said.
“I would not have put myself out there because I think I would have been too afraid to just walk into an audition without having a friendly face there. And also knowing that there was somebody who wasn’t going to let me fail … she just has a way of bringing out the best in people,” Stalder added.
The former judge said she’s gone from a theater amateur to a seasoned veteran of the stage who can do anything, be it backstage work, running the box office, and acting.
She says some of the skills learned in theater could easily apply to the law profession.
“A lot of times, when you’re playing a part, you’re trying to convince the audience that you are this person… You translate that into your skills as a lawyer by being able to be more persuasive and convincing,” Stalder said.
“It doesn’t mean that you’re not genuine, but persuasion is a huge part of being able to get the judge to give things your way if the judge is persuaded by who you are and your story and either your sincerity or your compassion,” she added.
It’s that humanity that Stalder says is at the forefront of all of Weems’ productions, especially in the plays with an all-law cast, because they allow the audience to take a peek behind the curtain into the lives of serious and straight-laced law professionals. “They [the audience] see a different side of them. And they start thinking, yeah, these are real people that have real lives. They’re not just these imaginary people that wear these black robes that sit up there in that high bench in that courtroom all day,” Stalder said.