404 Not Found

404 NOT FOUND
by Lucas Baisch
May 2024
$14
142 pages
5x7 inches
paper/perfect bound
ISBN: 979-8986581439

In Lucas Baisch’s 404 Not Found, we find ourselves at the back of a clay building that signals “stay away, stay awake.” Slack has a bad habit of holding people captive and now he’s the one shackled to a metal grate. Ro makes ends meet through drag-play for a truck-stop benefactor. She leverages her wages to travel down the neck of the Americas, making herself invisible along the way. Her cousin Cameo carries cups of water to Slack, then retreats to La Barranca, a digital landscape of his own invention where he encrypts documents for asylum-seekers—until one day, an anonymous disruptor forces him to meet at a new clay building that Cameo didn’t make. A twisting, twisted work of intricacy, density, and despair netted in kidnap, virtual utopias, upended borders, and Freddy Krueger cosplay.

PRAISE

I've been dreaming about this play since I read it. The language is psychotropic. These pages must be laced with DMT; the words have become bricks in the buildings of my dream-life. Lucas writes about fear in a way that makes me feel safe. His language is like a bed where you've just had a nightmare, and you're slowly, dangerously learning how to fall back asleep. The nightmare is still there. It's under you. It is you. But that's okay. He's one of the most important new voices in the theater.
- Will Arbery

Baisch’s language—an intoxicating fusion of the ecstatic, the hard-boiled and the mythic—pulls us into a series of haunted interior and exterior worlds that anxiously sit on the razor’s edge of reality. In doing so he captures something very disquieting and familiar about our current moment, and reveals himself to be a true poet.
- Christopher Chen

Lucidity is a privilege in Baisch’s shadowy landscape play, where guttural language and surrealist gore combine with stunning effect. Here, we are not given the opportunity to catch our breath as we saddle with the complex puzzle of each character’s journey. In a story of chance convergences, Baisch beautifully weaves together a prosaic oration of delusion and survival, in which necessity is protected by feigned innocence. Working alongside the likes of Evelio Rosero, João Pedro Rodrigues, Sarah Kane, and Qiu Miaojin, in 404 Not Found, Baisch has managed to create solace in the nightmare of American desolation. 
- Nazareth Hassan

CONTRIBUTORS

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 Bushwick Starr, The Mercury Store, First Floor Theater, Cutting Ball, Playwrights Horizons, Clubbed Thumb, The Neo-Futurists, Chicago Dramatists, Links Hall, etc. Lucas is a recipient of a Steinberg Playwright Award, the Princess Grace Award in Playwriting, a Jerome Fellowship, the Kennedy Center’s KCACTF Latinx Playwriting Award, and the Chesley/Bumbalo Playwriting Award. Outside of writing for theatre, his artwork has been presented at Elsewhere Museum, the Electronic Literature Organization, gallery no one, and the RISD Museum. He has held residencies through Ars Nova, Elsewhere Museum, Page 73, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Millay Arts, ACRE, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, the Goodman Theatre’s Playwrights Unit, and as a Lambda Literary Playwriting Fellow. Lucas’s previously published plays include Dry Swallow (Bloomsbury/Methuen Drama) and On the Y-Axis (Yale’s Theater Magazine). He received his MFA in Playwriting from Brown University.

Michael Costagliola is a New York-based sound designer and composer. His work has been heard in New York in productions by The Public, New York Theatre Workshop, La MaMa, Page 73, Rattlestick, and Ars Nova among others, as well as regionally at Shakespeare Theatre Company, Two River Theater, Yale Rep, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, St. Louis Rep, and at various other theaters across the U.S. and abroad. AB in Music from Brown University, MFA in Sound Design from Yale School of Drama.

Jonathan Herrera Soto (b. 1994, Chicago) lives and works in New Haven, CT. He received an MFA from The Yale School of Art in Painting & Printmaking and a BFA from Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Solo exhibitions of Herrera Soto’s work include “In Between / Underneath” at the Minneapolis Institute of Art and “All at Once” at Cohen Gallery, Brown University. He recently received the Yale Prison Education Initiative Fellowship, Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship, and was the 2023-2024 Koopman Distinguished Chair in the Visual Arts at the Hartford Art School.

Julia Jarcho is a playwright and director with the NYC company Minor Theater. Her plays include Grimly Handsome (2013; OBIE), Every Angel Is Brutal (2016), Pathetic (2019), and Marie It’s Time (2022). She has also written two scholarly books: Writing and the Modern Stage: Theater Beyond Drama (Cambridge, 2017) and Throw Yourself Away: Writing and Masochism (forthcoming from University of Chicago Press). She’s the head of playwriting at Brown.

Jesús I. Valles is a Mexican writer-performer who wishes to echo Rasha Abdulhadi’s call to you, dear reader, to refuse and resist the genocide of Palestinian people. “Wherever you are, whatever sand you can throw on the gears of genocide, do it now. The elimination of the Palestinian people is not inevitable. We can refuse with our every breath and action. We must.” Our liberation is bound to one another. May every border end.