The Bird Club: Letter to Sandra Bernhard
a seven-character one-human show
written & performed by Darren Patrick Blaney
directed by Kristina Goodnight, Jeremy Karafin & Marilee Talkington
produced in association with the San Francisco Fringe Festival, 2001
Revived at Works San Jose & The Broadway Playhouse, 2004
The Bird Club: Letter to Sandra Bernhard
excerpt 1: "Simple, Proud, Wasted”
Broadway Playhouse; Santa Cruz; May 15, 2004
The Bird Club: Letter to Sandra Bernhard
excerpt 2: "Another Aging Catholic Queen”
Broadway Playhouse; Santa Cruz; May 15, 2004
The Bird Club: Letter to Sandra Bernhard
excerpt 3: "Querida”
Broadway Playhouse; Santa Cruz; May 15, 2004
2004 PRESS RELEASE
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.
The Bird Club: Letter to Sandra Bernhard
Opening: Song for the Radical Fairies
Broadway Playhouse; Santa Cruz; May 15, 2004
publicity photo by Glenna Cole Allee, 2001
painting by Darren Patrick Blaney, 1995
publicity photo by Glenna Cole Alle, 2001
painting by Darren Patrick Blaney, 1995
THE BIRD CLUB program
THE PIECES:
*Song for the Radical Fairies
*Dear Sandra Bernhard
*First Character: A New Millennium
*Daydrea and the Marys
*Simple, Proud, Wasted, Real
*The Bird Club / Patron Saint of Basketball
*Another Aging Queen
*A Catholic, a Care-taker, an Altar Boy
*Bored, Bored, Bored: A Housewife’s Tale
*Never a Dull Moment
*Querida
*Childhood Bedroom
*Song for Sandra Bernhard
WRITER’S STATEMENT:
The seeds for this show germinated in my childhood neighborhood on Armstrong Road in Enfield CT, as well as in New York, San Francisco, and here in Santa Cruz. I began writing it while I lived near the corner of Park Place and Washington Avenue in Crown Heights Brooklyn from 1998-2000. I’d jot down a few sentences in spare ten-minute bursts on the sly while working at various temp jobs, or riding home on the subway train. Having an outlet like this gave me a sense of place and purpose, and afforded me the opportunity to exercise my imagination in that wild city.
The history of this show is an odd one. On New Millennium's Eve, I became inspired, and rather than following what had been my plan to get “gussied-up” in drag and hand-deliver my letter directly to Sandra Bernhard at the Westbeth Theater, I wrote “First Character” in a fit of holiday madness. I took a job as a cater-waiter, serving finger-food to Manhattan’s elite at a gala for the Metropolitan Opera, ushering in the Millennium by discreetly drinking champagne from coffee mugs, hiding from the supervisors in the phone booths near the restrooms. I had turned 30 that previous September, and was ready for a change. In a rare moment of clarity, I decided to move to San Francisco, after many years of debating the issue with anyone who would listen. Since then, I’ve produced the show at SF Fringe Festival, Works San Jose, and Shotwell Studios. I have performed pieces of it at The Marsh, City College, UC Santa Cruz, Piaf’s Q-Comedy, Kvetch, and other venues in the Bay Area. It continues to develop and I would love to find other venues that are interested in producing it. If you know of any, please do not hesitate to contact me at darrenblaney@cs.com.
Some of the pieces were inspired by people I know. Some were culled from the crinkling edges of my daydreams. Sandra Bernhard has been an inspiration to me for years and I hope someday that she may feel some inspiration and enjoyment from this show. She may be a goddess but she is not my mother. You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. Ain’t it the truth.
— Darren Patrick Blaney
MARCH 19, 2001 JOURNAL ENTRY
Dream of last night: Another Sandra Bernhard epic
I am sitting in a wing-shaped theater hall with red velvet seats, waiting for Ms. Berhard's concert to begin, with a few anonymous close friends that I just met yesterday but feel a strong spiritual connection to. The band on stage plays a few uninspired numbers. Without her, sadly enough, they are nothing. Finally, she emerges from behind the audience, kind of like Ally Sheedy did in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, but I see her before anyone else. She has her whole head shaved except for a few radical looking dread locks with feathers and beads that hang to one side, maybe one or two to the other side to balance it out, with a tattered black feather boa strung carelessly around her neck. She looks like some kind of fucked up neo-tribal punk version of "Frankenfurter", or something out of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, with black eyeliner smeared all around her eyes like Joe Namouth or Joan Jett. Not her best night, no siree. Her unconventional features make it impossible for her to pull off rotating her image the way that Madonna can. No matter how hard she tries, she is a comedian, not a chameleon. I can tell that she wants really badly to fit in and "be cool", but it isn't really working. She looks me right in the eyes. Hers are so big and wide, like an overgrown puppy, and I feel like I can swim in them. Recognizing me, she says, "Oh my God, it's you! Come on!" I want to save her somehow, or at least cheer her up, the same way she used to feel about Madonna.
Without anyone noticing, she waves for me to follow her out the back entrance of the theater. She starts running really fast around this winding corridor, like a true champion, and there are all these strung-out fans sitting against the walls, watching her run ahead and me chase after her. She has on black thigh-high boots but she can still sprint like a gazelle, suddenly she begins to look like one of those Amazon Xena Warrior Princesses, and I can't keep up with her. Finally she says, "Shit!" and turns around running back towards the entrance to the theater. I follow her again, trying to give her good vibes, "Run, Sandra, RUN!" I am shouting to her, because now she resembles the character from that film about Lola. I WANT HER TO SUCCEED. But she is pissed at me as I finally catch up to her at the door. She says, "You made me miss my sneaker cue. I totally fucked up my entrance because of you." I start apologizing profusely. Surprisingly, neither of us are winded. "I'm so sorry, I am sure you will give a good show anyway", I say trying to win back her favor. She ignores me and heads for the stage, but her band is already packing up, disgusted with her. She looks to the audience and has absolutely nothing to say, and I feel like it is all my fault.
Thanks to: Micah Lubensky; Mom & Dad; the Blaney Brothers; Olivia Brown; Astrid Persans; Raymona; Huber & Jeff & CoCo & Molly; Gaudior; Daydrea; Terri Steinman of Pisces Moon and the generous people of Santa Cruz Art League; Glenna Allee; Tommy Strong & Andrew Leavitt; Leyla Modirzadeh; Kevin Coulson for first turning me on to Sandy; and everyone else who has ever inspired me or believed I could put on a one-man show. Of course, a very special thanks is due to Ms. Sandra Bernhard herself, even though I have only spoken to her in person on four very brief occasions. Her responses have been progressively warmer each time I see her. I wonder if I am growing on her?
PRESS
“WORKS SAN JOSE:
Darren Patrick Blaney followed with a colorful performance of “The Bird Club: Letter to Sandra Bernhard.” Originally, Blaney meant to deliver the show in drag to Sandra Bernhard at the Westbeth Theater where she was performing, but the plan went awry, and the performance was transformed, instead, into a bittersweet tale of pan-gender metamorphoses. “The Bird Club” is a series of vignettes, a fantasy of reality chapters metamorphosing from one scene and character to the next. For close to an uninterrupted hour, Blaney performed a wide range of roles with uncanny veracity, including a former stripper turned apathetic Brooklyn housewife, a farsighted anthropologist, a lusty guy running wild with sexual fantasies in the locker room, a transgender lesbian hoping for true love, even an optimistic housecleaner who knows he is HIV+. This Works performance was by no means the first for Blaney: “The Bird Club” has been presented at numerous venues including festivals, cabarets, and galleries, in New York, Portland, and the Bay Area. Despite these multiple previous performances, Blaney’s delivery was both fresh and saucy, entertaining as well as compassionate, insightful.”
“SANTA CRUZ SENTINEL:
May 13, 2004
Darren Blaney pays tribute to comedienne Sandra Bernhard in his one-man show, ‘The Bird Club.’
One-man show channels Bernhard
By NANCY REDWINE
sentinel staff writer
The main reason Darren Blaney was accepted into the Bird Club was that he was the only effeminate boy in the neighborhood. The influence of that pre-adolescent-girls-only club would forever shape his life and perspective.
”Those girls were all older than me and I looked up to them,” said Blaney, who was 3 years old when he joined the Bird Club. “Since then, I’ve had lots of older women role models.”
One of those role models, comedienne and social critic Sandra Bernhard, is at the center of his new one-man performance, “The Bird Club: Letter to Sandra Bernhard,” with two shows Saturday night at the Broadway Playhouse.
”I look at Bernhard like I looked at my baby-sitter,” said the actor and playwright.
”I want to emulate her.”
It’s not only the wry, lippy and outrageous delivery of Bernhard the Santa Cruz teaching assistant is after, but her skill in moving from character to character to tell a story.
In “Bird Club” he moves through a range of characters in the telling of his prolonged childhood growing up gay in a New England Catholic family.
Moving from chair to chair — and through various stages of “gussied-up” drag — the tall, copper-haired Blaney channels the likes of a stoned night-watchman-turned-motivational speaker, a former stripper-turned-bored housewife, and an optimistic transgender housecleaner living with HIV.
”It’s a story of the struggle for fulfillment,” he said. “All of the characters want things that sometimes they can’t get. They’re imperfect people in an imperfect world.”
In that imperfect world, the main character abandons socially accepted gender roles in favor of what Blaney calls “a more liberated, pan-gender sense of identity.”
He admits to drawing his characters and dialogue from the lives and words of his friends. How do they feel about that?
”Some are flattered,” he said. “Some think it’s funny. And some have spanked me.”
Blaney, who graduated last year from UC Santa Cruz’s fifth-year acting program, had his first taste of theater in middle school when he played Jesus in the Passion Play.
”It’s been a hard act to follow,” he said. So for awhile, Blaney spent his creative energies as a portrait painter.
At 25, he came back to acting with an East Village spoof on the television series, “Dynasty.”
”It was called ‘My Own Private Eyeshadow,’” said Blaney. “It was guerrilla boot camp acting training.”
He was hooked. Since then Blaney has performed in Bay Area theater productions including CalShakes’ “Cymbeline,” Shakespeare Marin’s “Othello” and “The Tempest,” as well as “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” where he played George at UCSC. Currently, he studies with local acting teacher Ian McRae.
Last year, Blaney collaborated with playwright Kristina Goodnight on “What the Hell is Going On Here?” which ran in UC Santa Cruz’s Chautauqua Festival.
”It was set in a coffee shop where George Bush was an incompetent waiter,” he said.”