Lucas Baisch

Lucas Baisch is a playwright, artist, and educator from San Francisco. His plays have been read and developed at the Goodman Theatre, The Playwrights' Center, the Magic Theatre, The Bushwick Starr, the Mercury Store, Playwrights Horizons, Clubbed Thumb, Cutting Ball Theater, The Neo-Futurists, Stanford University, Chicago Dramatists, Links Hall, SF Playground, Ars Nova, The Fisher Center at Bard College, The NNPN/Kennedy Center MFA Playwrights' Workshop, etc.

Full-length plays include: REFRIGERATOR (First Floor Theater), On the Y-Axis (The Bushwick Starr Reading Series), Dry Swallow (Brown University), 404 Not Found (2022 O'Neill NPC Finalist), import speech_memory (Cutting Ball’s Variety Pack Festival), The Scavengers (DePaul University), A Measure of Normalcy (Gloucester Stage), and co...

Lucas Baisch is a playwright, artist, and educator from San Francisco. His plays have been read and developed at the Goodman Theatre, The Playwrights' Center, the Magic Theatre, The Bushwick Starr, the Mercury Store, Playwrights Horizons, Clubbed Thumb, Cutting Ball Theater, The Neo-Futurists, Stanford University, Chicago Dramatists, Links Hall, SF Playground, Ars Nova, The Fisher Center at Bard College, The NNPN/Kennedy Center MFA Playwrights' Workshop, etc.

Full-length plays include: REFRIGERATOR (First Floor Theater), On the Y-Axis (The Bushwick Starr Reading Series), Dry Swallow (Brown University), 404 Not Found (2022 O'Neill NPC Finalist), import speech_memory (Cutting Ball’s Variety Pack Festival), The Scavengers (DePaul University), A Measure of Normalcy (Gloucester Stage), and co-writing on The Arrow Cleans House (The Neo-Futurists).

Lucas is a recipient of a Steinberg Playwright Award, the Princess Grace Award in Playwriting (New Dramatists), a Jerome Fellowship (The Playwrights' Center), The Kennedy Center's KCACTF Latinx Playwriting Award, and the Chesley/Bumbalo Playwriting Award. Lucas has taught writing at Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design, Pratt Institute, Macalester College, The Playwrights' Center, and through the Chicago Public Schools. His plays have been published by Bloomsbury/Methuen Drama, Yale’s Theater Magazine, and 53rd State Press.

Outside of writing for theatre, his artworks have been presented at Elsewhere Museum, the Electronic Literature Organization, gallery no one, and the RISD Museum. He has held residencies through the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Millay Arts, ACRE, Elsewhere Museum, Page 73, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Ars Nova's Play Group, the Goodman Theatre's Playwrights Unit, and as a Lambda Literary Playwriting Fellow. Lucas is currently commissioned by The Alcove New Play Development Program at the Lucille Lortel Theatre.

In the realm of scholarship, his research interests arrive at the intersection between excess/dearth and affect theory. He’s invested in discard studies, material poetics, transgressive literatures, histories of excavation and technology’s influence on the composition of the playscript or artist’s score. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Performance Studies at Stanford University, where he is an inaugural Humanities & Sciences Dean's Scholar Fellow. MFA: Brown University, Playwriting.

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Scripts

Dogpile

by Lucas Baisch

1
Cast Size
7—11
Genre
dark comedy

[DRAFT] An anonymous caller manipulates a negligent suicide hotline agent. A philanthropist meddles with her museum contribution in the wake of her husband’s disappearance. A group of tiresome curators navigate the politics of an underground dog fighting ring. Examining the drive to consume, archive, and fetishize violence, Dogpile tells the story of stealing and giving back. Pity abounds ;)

[DRAFT] An anonymous caller manipulates a negligent suicide hotline agent. A philanthropist meddles with her museum contribution in the wake of her husband’s disappearance. A group of tiresome curators navigate the politics of an underground dog fighting ring. Examining the drive to consume, archive, and fetishize violence, Dogpile tells the story of stealing and giving back. Pity abounds ;)

Five Forgeries

by Lucas Baisch

Cast Size
4
Genre
experimental

[DRAFT] Four miniaturists work in four studios. Headlamps and magnifiers, tweezers and small brushes. They range from hobbyist to professional. Their actions lie in grief and game. All paths lead to the annual convention – a cheap, carpeted, hotel conference room. This is a play about the inefficacy of control.

[DRAFT] Four miniaturists work in four studios. Headlamps and magnifiers, tweezers and small brushes. They range from hobbyist to professional. Their actions lie in grief and game. All paths lead to the annual convention – a cheap, carpeted, hotel conference room. This is a play about the inefficacy of control.

404 Not Found

by Lucas Baisch

5
Cast Size
3
Genre
drama,
horror

We find ourselves on the outskirts – at the back of a clay building which signals "stay away, stay awake." Slack and Ro and Cameo divulge into monologue, tracing three pasts, a present, while portending some nightmare future. A lyrical project netted in kidnap, virtual utopias, upended borders, and Freddy Krueger cosplay.

Available for purchase through 53rd State Press.

We find ourselves on the outskirts – at the back of a clay building which signals "stay away, stay awake." Slack and Ro and Cameo divulge into monologue, tracing three pasts, a present, while portending some nightmare future. A lyrical project netted in kidnap, virtual utopias, upended borders, and Freddy Krueger cosplay.

Available for purchase through 53rd State Press.

Dry Swallow

by Lucas Baisch

4
Cast Size
7
Genre
dark comedy,
experimental,
tragedy

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...

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?

Available for purchase through Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Press.

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On the Y-Axis

by Lucas Baisch

3
Cast Size
4
Genre
dark comedy,
experimental,
horror

Last fall, a PG&E power line explodes. A shed catches flame. A tree. A neighborhood. Today, a hard drive tumbles its way out of a hole – out of the home of a burnt corpse – and data item turns into cataclysm. Part climate anxiety, part Book of Revelation, part digital archive: On the Y-Axis presents “play” as a poison to the host body.

Available for purchase through Yale's Theater Magazine, Duke University...

Last fall, a PG&E power line explodes. A shed catches flame. A tree. A neighborhood. Today, a hard drive tumbles its way out of a hole – out of the home of a burnt corpse – and data item turns into cataclysm. Part climate anxiety, part Book of Revelation, part digital archive: On the Y-Axis presents “play” as a poison to the host body.

Available for purchase through Yale's Theater Magazine, Duke University Press.

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import speech_memory

by Lucas Baisch

2
Cast Size
6
Genre
dark comedy,
drama,
experimental

Mackie, Wick, and Pendejo are self-declared natives of San Francisco, victims of a growing housing crisis. Recruited by Susanna, the employee of an unnamed start-up, they’ve been promised free shelter in exchange for participation in an audio farming procedure. S.B.’s tired of renovating her living room, so she drives west to find those responsible for the theft of her speech – now, a nationally exhausted...

Mackie, Wick, and Pendejo are self-declared natives of San Francisco, victims of a growing housing crisis. Recruited by Susanna, the employee of an unnamed start-up, they’ve been promised free shelter in exchange for participation in an audio farming procedure. S.B.’s tired of renovating her living room, so she drives west to find those responsible for the theft of her speech – now, a nationally exhausted natural-language voice assistant. What bodies are being targeted by surveillance systems? What cultural amnesia is embedded inside the idea of home? What is authentic in a world of ubiquity?

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REFRIGERATOR

by Lucas Baisch

4
Cast Size
5
Genre
dark comedy,
horror,
mystery/thriller,
science fiction

Eighty-two percent of the planet's population has disposed of their physical bodies and uploaded their consciousness to the IceBox. The company's last employees continue to provide transitional services for clients making the ascent. Benjamin's won the lottery and spends his final day in the office, while his coworkers battle with their own moral and socioeconomic inability to abandon their individual visions of...

Eighty-two percent of the planet's population has disposed of their physical bodies and uploaded their consciousness to the IceBox. The company's last employees continue to provide transitional services for clients making the ascent. Benjamin's won the lottery and spends his final day in the office, while his coworkers battle with their own moral and socioeconomic inability to abandon their individual visions of reality.

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