Darcie Dennigan Wins Inaugural Anna Rabinowitz Prize
The Poetry Society of America named Darcie Dennigan the recipient of the inaugural Anna Rabinowitz Prize, judged this year by Matthea Harvey. The organization's press release explains that Dennigan has been chosen for her play, "The Happy End, an athletic performance piece, an adaptation of Mónica de la Torre's collection of poems The Happy End / All Welcome (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017), performed at the Wilbury Theatre as part of the Providence Fringe Festival in 2018." The $1000 prize "is awarded to poets and their collaborators for venturesome, interdisciplinary work made in the previous year and combining poetry and any other art or discipline. It was established by the children of Anna Rabinowitz to honor her boundless curiosity, creativity, and artistic accomplishments." In a statement, Matthea Harvey writes:
Darcie Dennigan's The Happy End, an athletic performance piece, adapted from Mónica de la Torre's The Happy End / All Welcome jumps off the page onto the stage, sparkling with wit and absurdity. Given that de la Torre's book drew inspiration from Martin Kippenburger's exhibit, The Happy End of Franz Kafka's Amerika (Amerika was Kafka's unfinished novel), it seems fitting that Dennigan takes on yet another transformation. In The Happy End, Dennigan presents a frenzied job application process, with the various characters (including a recruiter, yesman, two applicants and an ingenue) dashing between chairs and roles as they apply for a job as a lifeguard, armchair psychologist, line cook, guerilla advertiser and furniture tester and unpaid intern at an experimental theater company. Audience-inclusive, crammed with puns and business-speak terminology like "operational efficiencies" and "synergy"—The Happy End left me breathless and looking at my own "office chair" with new eyes.
The participants include Beth Alianiello, Stine An, Kate Colby, Cody Curran, Darcie Dennigan, Matthew Derby, Carl Dimitri, Zoe Guttenplan, and Mónica de la Torre. The production's final performance at the Wilbury Theatre (Providence, RI) is on Saturday, April 13. Learn more at Poetry Society of America.