Desiree Burch: all the best

"It's an hour, and change, of comedy," Desiree Burch, TD '01, announces near the start of her Greatest Hits 1979-2001. The statement is meant to establish the evening that is to come in contrast with what Burch sees as a general dependence on pretentious philosophizing and deep conversations. The play, her senior project for the Theater Studies major, isn't so easily quantifiable as strict comedy, however. Instead it rides a narrow line between comedy and philosophizing, establishing itself as a truly theatrical creation—neither easy to define nor digest.

ERIN I. LEWIS/YH

The show itself is a testament to Burch's ability. She is both its author and its star, a feat that only grows more impressive with the knowledge that it is essentially a series of exhaustingly extensive monologues—comic (and not so) ruminations on life and circumstance. What begins as stand-up comedy eventually segues into a series of character sketches, and eventually even into a concert.

REBECCA ROSENTHAL/YH

This is not a conventional play, nor conventional comedy. Rather, it's a performance piece that works best as holistic experience. That isn't to say there aren't amazing individual moments. When a life-size teddy bear, played by Ian Robertson, DC '01, attempts to woo Burch with a series of offensive claims to emotional complexity, it is truly original hilarity. The evening is sprinkled with quick one-liners, often slightly odd—take for instance her throw-away line, "So instead I imagine drowning cats and I'm okay." Trust me, the laughs were across the board.

REBECCA ROSENTHAL/YH

However, what's most effective about the work is the contrast between the constant stream of speech and the ever-changing use of physical space and actress persona. The sheer volume of words—the extraordinary length of monologue—is overwhelming at times. Early in the play Burch asks the audience, "Do you realize how much we all talk?" and the rest of the performance seems the proof.

The purposeful proof, that is. While she calls this abundance of speech excretion, she also contends that "sometimes in the middle of all that brown stuff you find a diamond." And in the evening spent under her command—the embrace of every individual moment, of each inch of the Af-Am House, of each old man, or gentleman, or rock star, or young woman she embodied—the audience found those diamonds in many places. The utter wash of language eventually led to a release of dependence on the explicit meaning of the words. In its place came an immersion in brave physicality and the beauty of total vulnerability—and its corrollary strength.

Burch says at the start of her Greatest Hits, "it's all about right now." Well, right then was pretty damn funny and pretty damn good.

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