Saturday Night Live alum and Lexington native Rachel Dratch will celebrate Patriots’ Day at home this year as she joins the Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival on April 17-19. Catch Dratch at an installment of StarTalk Live! as she and other comedians talk science with Bill Nye at the Citi Shubert Theatre on April 19.

Do you have any plans for when you’re back in Boston? I love Brigham’s, but they’re disappearing, so that makes me sad. Now there’s like no Brigham’s left anywhere; it’s like a Bruce Springsteen song.… Whenever I go back to Boston, I’m back out in the suburbs to see all my friends. We go to the suburban locations, random Chinese restaurants and stuff.

Which character has been your favorite to play? Well, probably my favorite was my first Debbie Downer at Disney World, where we all started laughing.

You look like you’re in pain trying to keep it together. I know! Well, you try not to laugh because you know it’s kind of a cheap trick. Like the audience eats it up when you laugh, so I would really try not to. Sometimes when you started laughing, you could usually sort of hide your face down or be behind somebody or at least try to disguise it. But in that one, I knew the camera was coming at me every single time, so there was nowhere to run. So it added an extra level of panic.

What’s the best part of interacting with comedians during improv, as opposed to during a scripted scene? I guess it’s just kind of a different part of your brain. Speaking of science, I actually just read in an article like two days ago that the part of your brain responsible for improv is a whole different part of your brain that would be responsible for writing a script or writing a funny comedy scene. So I think I definitely have a better improv brain than a sketch-writing brain, but it’s just a little more freeing. You have to be in the moment; you have to listen to your teammates, or improv-mates—fellow performers, I guess I should say. When you’re in the zone, it’s kind of this very free feeling.