←Recommendations of Dry Swallow

This play stopped my heart in its tracks - incredible.

Gentrification, opioid addiction and so many other timely issues are explored in this much-needed play. The play is poetic and filled with movement while also feeling real and raw. The choice of having the entire piece take place in a shipping container is inspired and I hope inspires many site-specific productions.

This play threw me through a whirlwind of sensations. The visual imagery is one that will stick with me, that will likely appear in my dreams when I least expect it. Baisch's exploration of worth and privilege in each of the worlds was exciting to read and the form this exploration is encapsulated in is wildly innovative.

Extremely compelling imagery and narratives are threaded together here. Baisch's theatrical world is specific, mindbending, and utilizes sights/sounds/textures in incredible ways. The characterization is magnificent and the way these stories and humans weave together is surprising and exciting to watch. The themes explored are manifold--substance abuse, art and ethics, socioeconomic imbalance and conspicuous consumption, and identity as commodity are merely a few of the issues Baisch examines. The transitions, the entire visual landscape as described in stage directions, and magical moments are all so rich and rife for the unpacking. How I'd love to see this live.

DRY SWALLOW's shipping container unfolds as something like a psycho-geographic Venn diagram - an overlapping triad of narratives that evolve together and apart. Inside this unruly illustration, cinder blocks are born and we look into dogs' buttholes for prophecies. The impact of Baisch's imagery is highly accumulative and lasting; the play overflows with cutting moments that illuminate horizontal violence in all its forms. This cubist work asks us where and when our codependency becomes something sinister. It shows us the vertical system stacked against us, and makes the system eat his own tail until he suffocates in slow motion.