A Rabbit Named Rainer: Regie Cabico and Drew Pisarra
As part of The Tank’s Pridefest 2024, spoken word legend Regie Cabico and acclaimed poet-playwright Drew Pisarra present an hour-long evening of poetry, pushing the very idea of the poetry reading into new and uncharted territory. Hot on the heels of their respective new poetry collections A Rabbit in Search of a Rolex (2023) and Fassbinder: His Movies, My Poems (2024), Cabico and Pisarra will explore the overlap of poetry and performance with a split bill of theatricalized verse. The upcoming experiments are natural outgrowths of their interdisciplinary backgrounds: Cabico is a founding member of NYC’s Neo-Futurists and the recipient of a NY Innovative Theater Award while Pisarra had three theatrical premieres in 2023 alone – including Click, a co-production of The Tank. Special guest, poet Andrew Tye, will open the evening with an excerpt from his performance piece My Son.
Regie Cabico, a spoken word pioneer, won the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam and was the first openly queer poet to take prizes in three National Poetry Slams. His TV credits include HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, TEDx and NPR’s Snap Judgment. The Executive Director of A Gathering of the Tribes, Cabico received a 2008 Future Aesthetics Arts Award from The Ford Foundation, three NYFA Fellowships for Poetry/Performance, the Larry Neal Award for Poetry, and several DC Commission for the Arts Poetry Fellowships. His solo plays have been developed/produced at Dixon Place, Joe’s Pub, The Public Theater, Asian Arts Initiative, Magic Theater, and the Humana Theater Festiva. His first full-length poetry collection A Rabbit in Search of a Rolex was released by Day Eight in 2023.
A participating poet in The Whitney Biennial 2022, Drew Pisarra authored two short story collections, You’re Pretty Gay (2021) and Publick Spanking (1996), two sonnet collections, Infinity Standing Up (2019) and Periodic Boyfriends (2023); and two radio plays, The Strange Case of Nick M. (2021) and Price in Purgatory (2023). A grantee of Café Royal Cultural Foundation, Curious Elixirs: Curious Creators and LMCC, he’s also collaborated recently with Imago Theatre Co-Founder Jerry Mouawad on dancetheatre work Voiceover (2022) and existential puppet show My Bedroom Is an Installation (2023) – cited as one of the top five productions of the year by Willamette Week. His latest poetry collection Fassbinder: His Movies, My Poems was released by Anxiety Press in 2024.
