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excerpt 2 from "The Bird Club" including 'Another Aging Catholic Queen'
excerpt 3 from "The Bird Club" including 'Querida' & Folk Song for Sandy
excerpt 4 from "The Bird Club" including "Song for the Radical Fairies"
2004 PRESS RELEASE
The Bird Club: Letter to Sandra Bernhard
Written
and performed by Darren Blaney
Directed
by Kristina Goodnight, Jeremy Karafin, and Marilee Talkington
Twice produced in San Francisco (at Shotwell Studios & the Phoenix Theater in the SF Fringe Festival, 2001),
and more recently staged at Works San Jose, Darren will breathe new
life into this one-human show The Bird
Club: Letter to Sandra Bernhard on May 15 at the Broadway Playhouse in Santa
Cruz.
Culled from both real life and the crinkling edges
of daydreams, this show blends the fantastic with the interpretive. For the eve of the millennium, it had been
Darren's plan to get "gussied-up" in drag and hand-deliver his
autobiography to Sandra Bernhard at the Westbeth theater in N.Y.C. His plan goes awry in this story of a
pangender artist discovering a full identity amidst the vestiges of unrequited
love and the natural wonders of the Golden State. 
With his series of original monologues,
Darren shows us a collection of wistful yet optimistic people who challenge the
viewer to come along for the ride of his sanguine daydreams. Admittedly influenced by artists as diverse
as Sandra Bernhard, Whoopie Goldberg, John Leguizamo, Tim Miller, Joni
Mitchell, and David Sedaris; Darren's stories and characterizations unveil a
worldview that incorporates a broad range of human experience. From his first autobiographical monologue,
which chronicles his bizarre childhood growing up gay and Catholic in a
dysfunctional New England home, Darren sets the stage
with a shamelessly confessional tone. Interwoven into this story are songs and characters that draw us further
into the web that he spins with his unusual style of story telling. Playing numerous characters including a stoned
night-watchman turned motivational speaker, a former stripper turned bored
housewife, and optimistic transgender housecleaner living with HIV, Darren
gives us real life in sixty minutes without the commercials of prime-time
television. His vision is one that moves
from despair and disillusion to freedom and hope in an attempt to inspire even
the most jaded theatergoer.
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