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Want Shrooms on That Pizza? In 'Exhaustion Arroyo,' the Answer Is Yes

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La Karen (Natalia Delgado) demands better service as the onsite manager (Edna Raia) prepares to approach in Cutting Ball Theater and IN THE MARGIN’s ‘Exhaustion Arroyo: Dancin’ Trees in the Ravine’ by W. Fran Astorga. (Ben Krantz)

Playwright W. Fran Astorga’s Exhaustion Arroyo: Dancin’ Trees in the Ravine is a trip — in both senses of the word. Running through May 21 at San Francisco’s Cutting Ball Theater, the play was inspired by an early pandemic experience in the Santa Cruz mountains.

“I was with some really creative friends… and we went into the woods and did shrooms. And that experience really stuck with me,” says Astorga, who also co-directs.

Shroom (Natalia Delgado, middle left), replenishes los tres amigos Apé (Patricio Becerril, left), Chío (Pano Roditis, middle right) and Taki (Edna Raia, right) in Cutting Ball Theater and IN THE MARGIN’s ‘Exhaustion Arroyo: Dancin’ Trees in the Ravine’ by W. Fran Astorga. (Ben Krantz)

In the intimate 48-seat, circular theater made to look like a forest, it is fictional characters Taki, Chío and Apé, co-workers at a pizza place, who go on the psychedelic adventure. Underpinning the sometimes goofy physical comedy, though, is a meditation on inequality, the exploitation of essential workers and the importance of community care — drawn from Astorga’s own experience as an essential worker.

Performed in Spanglish, Astorga is intentional and unapologetic in rejecting the white, heteronormative gaze, which they’d had to cater to in past experiences working in theater.

“I come from a community in Stanislaus County [and] we transition between Spanish and English very fluently,” Astorga says. “And that’s what’s in the show: this dialect of the Central Valley that, in English, is slang from the Bay and slang from Southern California. And in Spanish, it’s like Spanglish slang, but also slang from specific parts of Mexico. So it’s like a really cool cultural blend.”

(L–R) The burglar (Patricio Becerril) and Taki (Edna Raia) team up in fear of an even bigger threat — La Karen — in Cutting Ball Theater and IN THE MARGIN’s ‘Exhaustion Arroyo: Dancin’ Trees in the Ravine’ by W. Fran Astorga. (Ben Krantz)

Exhaustion Arroyo also features the professional theater debut of actor and Santa Rosa native Patricio Becerril, who plays Apé. Becerril, who studied theater at Santa Rosa Junior College before finishing his degree at UC San Diego, says the play is unlike anything he’s done.

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“It’s very clown-like, it’s very commedia dell’arte,” Becerril says. “So it’s not your traditional acting set on realism. It’s more animated. It’s just… wacky!”

Astorga says that wackiness and humor was necessary in taking on the heavier themes of the play: “It was important for me to like, speak to the experiences of my community in a joyful way, as opposed to a traumatic way.”

‘Exhaustion Arroyo: Dancin’ Trees in the Ravine’ runs through May 21, 2023, at Cutting Ball Theater in San Francisco. Details here.

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