Dry Swallow

Description

Took me twenty years, from fetus to fuck-up, to know what weight looked like, what weight feels like, what weight makes a body do in place of freedom. Sitting within the confines of a shipping container, people are rendered commodity and turf is marked for value. Chula and Pal create competition on a Boyle Heights street corner. Nasir and Porter offer medicinal intake as artistic practice. Sik and Dori turn to drastic measures in order to save their family. Dry Swallow explores surrogacy, consumption, and substance abuse, while provoking the question: who's allowed a healthy life? Lucas Baisch's play was the recipient of The Kennedy Center's KCACTF 2020 Latinx Playwriting Award, the Princess Grace Award in Playwriting (2021) and the Chesley/Bumbalo Award in Playwriting (2021).

Lucas Baisch [ he / him ] is a Guatemalan-Mexican-American playwright and artist from San Francisco, whose work circulates within themes of systems, waste, and excess. His plays have been read and developed at The Goodman Theatre, The NNPN/Kennedy Center MFA Playwrights' Workshop, Playwrights Horizons, Clubbed Thumb, Chicago Dramatists, Links Hall, SF Playground, etc. Full-length plays include: REFRIGERATOR (First Floor Theatre), On the Y-Axis (The Bushwick Starr Reading Series), Dry Swallow (Brown University), import speech_memory (Cutting Ball's Variety Pack Festival), The Scavengers (DePaul University), A Measure of Normalcy (Gloucester Stage Company), and co-writing on The Arrow Cleans House (The Neo-Futurists). Lucas is a recipient of a 2020 Steinberg Playwright Award, the Kennedy Center's 2020 KCACTF Latinx Playwriting Award, and the 2021 Chesley/Bumbalo Playwriting Award. He was most recently awarded a 2021-22 Jerome Fellowship through the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis. Lucas has taught writing at Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design, and through the Chicago Public Schools.

Perhaps the most striking element of the production is Baisch's prose itself. His characters, in their frequent monologues, do not so much speak as spew, hurling effervescent bits of language to the audience at a giddying rate. This effusion, when directed toward the audience, has the effect of making us feel implicated in the whole mess playing out on stage - which, of course, we are. * Brown Daily Herald * Joking, begging, sneering, and mourning all at once-Baisch uses raw language in order to flesh out how we relate to one another within (around, against) oppressive structures. * BOMB Magazine * Baisch's voracious appetite produces work that is greater than the sum of its individual parts, more multiplication than addition. * New City Stage *