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Comedienne Burns cools the flames of end-of-season ire
BY LAURA RASKIN INDEPENDENT ARTS WRITER
By the time Labor Day rolls around on Nantucket, Stop & Shop parking lot rage is
explosive, inching forward on cobblestones has pulled neck tendons taut and sunstroke has parched good will.
Time to lighten up.
Comedienne and actress Susan Burns has been salving islanders with the cooling aloe gel of her “Comedy Extravaganza” for almost two decades.
This year the Theatre Workshop of Nantucket presents Burns and a few special guests, including Amy Stiller, on Monday and Tuesday, Sept. 5 and 6, at the Methodist Church.
Burns has been coming to the island for summers since she was a young teenager. She was a familiar apprentice in the 1960s at a theater company no longer in existence on Straight Wharf where she learned via osmosis from the likes of Harvey Keitel and Perry King. Her Nantucket fodder goes deep. The material she lays on weary islanders is about all of us, from the pink pants we insist on calling red to the traffic we endure on a place that is 14 miles east to west. It comes at a time when islanders are desperately in need of being poked fun at and reminded how to take a joke.
Burns caters her once-a-year act on the island to the place (read: tones it down), but she has never been a fan of jokes that are not current and pertinent. In a telephone interview last week she said she is not one to make the, “So, I stopped smoking last week …” joke if in fact she stopped smoking two years ago.
James Cennamo, cartoonist for The Nantucket Independent and normally part of Burns’ Labor Day weekend act, could not make it this year.
“Susan is probably one of the funniest people I know,” said Cennamo by phone. A comedian himself, who honed his skills in the late ’90s in Cambridge, Cennamo said Burns is gregarious and hilarious. “She marches to her own drummer.”
Burns is fun to drive with, he said. She keeps her complaints and dead-on observations of traffic and passers-by inside the car, but she keeps her passengers entertained.
As a resident New Yorker, Burns’ comedy in the city is edgier and more political. It makes sense that her mentor was the barking and caustic Lewis Black, now of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” fame, who started a comedy cabaret in the ’80s in Greenwich Village called “Café Sylvette.” Pablo Picasso’s statue of Sylvette stood nearby.
“We thought it was run by the mafia,” said Burns of her early stage. She also worked with Black at the West Bank Café and was in a political comedy group that was once Bloomer's Humor, then the Grown Up Show. She still works with that group, although it is now “in flux,” she said. This spring Burns performed in "Bush on a Hot Tin Roof." She played Barbara.
Burns' acting, comedy and writing career is also in flux and somewhat indefinable.
“I’ll do whatever I can do to stay out there,” she said, in a lively conversation that was more streamof conscience than it was an interview.
Although its derivative, comedy is more difficult than acting, said Burns. “Being in a play is actually not as frightening. If you’re in something you wrote yourself and then performing, it’s scary because if I do something that’s about me and it feels pertinent and the audience is asleep … am I boring?”
Burns began her act parodying characters she met in travels or saw on stage. “I was in an eating disorder group and I parodied a woman who I met who was so serious,” she said cautiously, relaying one of the woman's more ridiculous comments. She also mimicked Ann Miller, a fast-tapping dancer and actress and dancer. “It started with silly things,” said Burns of her early material. “It was more social commentary.”
What Burns finds astounding now that her repertoire is political are the people who have no interest in current politics.
“Some people think political comedy is making fun of Michael Dukakis’ eyebrows, whereas there are people who can be biting without offending,” she said.
A year ago, her emcee at a show in New York was doing controversial, anti-Bush material. Burns recognized a Nantucket gentleman in the front row and cringed. It symbolized the difference between the island and the big city. “I don’t have to be anybody but a comedian," she said of New York.
While she has a sister who is a novelist and another who is a journalist, Burns did not grow up with performers. Her father was a politician, though, and she has always been interested in that particular world of showmanship.
Burns recalled telling her brother-in-law, from a low key family in the Midwest, that it incensed her when people replied to her firm statements, "Tell us how you really feel," a sarcastic statement and one borne out of anxiety.
Her brother-in-law replied, "Well, some people don't have opinions." This stunned Burns, who makes a living out of delivering them in distillation. "I was speechless for a few minutes," said Burns. "I guess that's why there are comedians. They will say things others won't say. Not because they're petrified …" Perhaps because they do not observe, Burns guessed. "Sometimes you want someone to say, 'Why are we doing this?'"
Burns doles it out in "Comedy Extravaganza" for TWN on Monday and Tuesday, Sept. 5 and 6, at 8:30 p.m. at the Methodist Church, 2 Centre St. Call the box office for details at 228-4305.
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