Tercentenary’s His Next Theater

Jess R. Burkle ’06 is a veteran of the Harvard stage, but even so, he won’t feel adequately prepared when he gets behind the podium to give today’s male Ivy Oration. And that’s the way he likes it.

“I have a tendency to improv in public speaking, which can sometimes lead to disastrous consequences,” says Burkle, leaning back in a chair in Quincy courtyard. “I feel like as long as I don’t make a racial slur, I’m okay.”

The Winthrop House resident and French concentrator has been acting in and directing shows since his freshman spring—this year Burkle directed Eugene Ionesco’s existential face “Rhinoceros” and his own translation of French playwright Jules Romain’s “Knock.”

But he didn’t consider applying to give a Class Day address until his roommate reminded him about the competition 40 minutes before the deadline.

He cranked out 14 pages, submitted them—and was promptly misfiled.

“I have a faux-serious paragraph at the beginning of my speech, so they put me in the serious pile,” Burkle says, “and my name is Jess, so they put me in the women’s pile.”

Once the clerical error was fixed, the Senior Class Committee was won over by Burkle’s speech, which he says was inspired in part by an encounter at a cocktail party he attended as a pre-frosh.

“I met one terrible Harvard person,” Burkle said, “and I was like ‘I swear I will never be that man.’”

Nevertheless, Burkle fears that in some ways he has not been able to escape the stereotypical Harvard air.

“My speech is basically about how we’re cripplingly smart, and so I feel like no one else is going to understand the speech outside our class, and it’ll just make my point,” he says. “I could come off as a giant asshole.”

But despite the traditionally humorous bent of the Ivy Orations, Burkle says he still wants to take the opportunity to say something meaningful.

“Because I was so active in theater all the time, I felt like I was on an island for a lot of my college career, and I didn’t get to pay enough attention to the people in my class who really made a big difference in my life,” Burkle says. “So I wanted to do something.”

And indeed, Burkle says that the people he has met at Harvard have been as formative as his theater work.

“The cliché is true,” Burkle says. “My Harvard experience was the friends that I have, and playing Mario Kart for three consecutive hours in my room was just as important as any play I ever did.”

Burkle draws a deep contrast between his speech and that of his “very talented” fellow Ivy Orator Lizzie S. Widdicombe ’06, saying he was the “Home Improvement” to her “Frasier.”

“I am lowbrow entertainment,” Burkle said. “I might as well just drop trou.”

—Staff writer Laurence H. M. Holland can be reached at lholland@fas.harvard.edu.