Playwright Darcie Dennigan Wins Anna Rabinowitz Award For THE HAPPY END

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 and an adaptation of Mónica de la Torre's collection of poems The Happy End / All Welcome (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017), The Happy End was originally performed as part of the Providence Fringe Festival in 2018 and is currently being remounted at The Wilbury Theatre Group until April 13.

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 collaborators also named in the Award 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 Group (Providence, RI) is on Saturday, April 13.

Darcie Dennigan is a poet and playwright, and the author of four books, including The Parking Lot and Other Feral Scenarios. From 2011-2016, she was the founding director of Frequency Writers, a nonprofit literary community in Providence, RI. In the fall of 2018, her play The Pleiades was presented by The Wilbury Theatre Group as part of their New Works / Studio W programming, and she is currently publishing and performing monologues from her F-Scale project, which applies the test for fascist personalities to her own life. For the Providence Fringe Fest, she has staged three books of poetry: Monica de la Torre's The Happy End / All Welcome, Kate Colby's I Mean, and her own poem-play Dandelion Farm, which was inspired by Pina Bausch's 1980.

In January 2019 she was named Playwright-in-Residence at The Wilbury Theatre Group. Her new play, The Recycling Party! Or, The Fish will receive a staged reading as part of the Wilbury Group's 2019 Festival of New Works and will receive a world premiere production in the Wilbury Group's 2019/20 Season.

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