Jess R. Burkle ’06

Though I arrived at my interview with Jess R. Burkle ’06 wishing I had never gotten out of bed—having to walk through the wind and rain with only my flimsy inside-out umbrella had hardly put me in the best of moods—I couldn’t help smiling at Burkle’s enthusiasm, candor, and sense of humor once we started to talk. The senior actor and director sat down with the Crimson to discuss his background, current projects, and plans for the future.

Burkle’s involvement in drama began with his debut in an unusual musical during elementary school.

Fifth grade was my first play. A teacher at our school always wrote a play every year. I was originally not in her class, and she asked for me to be in her class, so I starred as Bad Bart in our copyright infringement extravaganza known as “Sundown Oklahoma,” a combination of many different musicals kind of strung together, and it was a lip-synching musical extravaganza, so we had a CD, and then I would mouth the words and do choreography. And that was a stunning success.

When Burkle arrived at Harvard, he didn’t join the theater program immediately. Yet he eventually returned to drama and since then has played a variety of roles, not least that of director.

When I got here, actually, I didn’t do anything fall semester freshman year because I was intimidated. I thought that everyone was going to be the virtuosos that I read about in Entertainment Weekly so I held off, but that was a bad choice because it was a semester when I was bored out of my mind and I should have been doing other things. So spring I jumped in, I started out, I did a show in Adams House, a show in the Ag, and since then I’ve worked in the Loeb Ex doing stuff. So you just kind of move up and then directing came kind of at a point in evolution where you feel like the only way you can learn more is by teaching what you do. And that’s where I am right now.

Burkle is currently portraying Alwa in Visiting Director Brendan Hughes’ production of “Lulu,” playing on the Loeb mainstage through October 29.

“Lulu” is great. It’s my first time on the mainstage and my first time with a visiting director which is great because it gives you a sense of objectivity about the level of work you do. And also he’s great because he gives a lot of new ideas because we tend to, well, not stagnate, but we only have each other to bounce ideas off of, so it’s great to have an outside force like that and working on the mainstage is wonderful. That kind of energy that we all had to put into it because we had, you know, less than three weeks, so it’s just kind of this giant push to it…it’s a very collaborative project, which I love.

Later this semester, he will take on the challenge of directing a production of “Rhinoceros,” a French absurdist play.

A lot of people find [“Rhinoceros”] very ridiculous, and almost everyone has seen a bad production of it because when I say it to a lot of people they wince…but I find it actually to be both very funny and very scary at the end. It has a lot of sociological implications and I used to [concentrate in] French and sociology—now I’m just French—so I always loved theatre that’s about creating a world and a whole society, building something totally new. So that’s what “Rhinoceros” really is, this whole different world that we get to create.

Though Burkle will be graduating this spring without definite plans for how he will stay involved in performing arts, he is determined to keep doing creative work after he leaves Harvard.

So my new line [for what I’m doing after graduation] is “the journey,” which makes people want to punch me in the face. Really, I have no idea. I had thought about acting, but it’s so chancy that I’m not sure. It’ll definitely be something in the arts, probably television—it’s what I was weaned on, so I imagine I may fall into that, but we’ll see, something that’s artistically enriching and what not. That’s what I’m looking for.