Dry Swallow
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published:13th Jan '22
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
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).
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 *
ISBN: 9781350291706
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 109g
88 pages