404 Not Found - by Lucas Baisch (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Lucas Baisch is a playwright and artist from San Francisco. His plays have been read and developed at the Goodman Theatre, The Playwrights' Center, The NNPN/Kennedy Center MFA Playwrights' Workshop, The Bushwick Starr, The Mercury Store, Cutting Ball Theater, Playwrights Horizons, Clubbed Thumb, The Neo-Futurists, Chicago Dramatists, Links Hall, SF Playground, 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), 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, a Jerome Fellowship from The Playwrights' Center, the Kennedy Center's KCACTF Latinx Playwriting Award, and the Chesley/Bumbalo Playwriting Award. He is currently a member of Page 73's Interstate 73 writers group and Ars Nova's Play Group. Lucas has taught writing at Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design, Macalester College, The Playwrights' Center, and through the Chicago Public Schools. His plays have been published by Bloomsbury/Methuen Drama and Yale's Theater Magazine. 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 ACRE, Elsewhere Museum, Millay Arts, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, the Goodman Theatre's Playwrights Unit, and as a Lambda Literary Playwriting Fellow. MFA: Brown University.