From Napa’s Margins to the San Francisco Stage
The characters in Belly of the Beast don’t look like the ones audiences are used to seeing in stories about eating disorders. That is exactly the point.
“I had an eating disorder,” said Aisha Rivera, a Napa-based playwright, poet and actor. “I was diagnosed about seven years ago. I’m now in a much better place.
But the general poster child for an eating disorder you see in the media is a thin, little white girl. Most people who struggle with this are not underweight.”
Rivera’s new work, premiering this month at the Playground Free-Play Festival in San Francisco, instead centers on a trans, nonbinary lead and features bodies that defy the industry’s narrow molds. “You can’t cast a lead who is small, or else the play doesn’t work,” Rivera said in an interview with the Napa County Times. “We’re talking about fat liberation, health at every size… things like that.”
An Amplifi Napa Valley Creativos Emerging Artist, Rivera said the grant from the organization gave them time to create while Theatre Bay Area’s support enabled them to produce the show with Teatro Alebrijes del Valle, Napa’s first Latine theater company, founded just last year.
Though Belly of the Beast premieres in San Francisco, Rivera’s artistic lens remains shaped by Napa Valley, where, they say, the stages still lean heavily toward “the classics and white stories.”
“I feel like there isn’t a lot of representation, especially in the stories we tell on stage,” Rivera said.
“Aside from Es Una Vida Maravillosa, I can’t think of another play we’ve seen at the college or in any local theaters that centers a different identity. It doesn’t even have to be Latino, we have a big Filipino community here too.”
Es Una Vida Maravillosa which premiered in 2023, was a Spanish-language stage adaptation of It’s a Wonderful Life, reimagined as the story of an aspiring Mexican Folklórico dancer, her family and her small California hometown.
Earlier this summer, Alebrijes del Valle staged a Spanish-language reading of Enemigo del Pueblo, a Latine-centered reimagining of Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 drama exploring censorship.
Progress in diverse storytelling is emerging across the county, often in isolated pockets, driven by local arts organizations.
For Rivera, Belly of the Beast has been a long time coming.
“It took me about five years to finally feel good and feel recovered,” they said in an interview with Napa County Times. “Since I graduated from treatment in 2021, I’d been wanting to write it, but I wasn’t ready.”
This past year, they finally entered the mental space to take it on, they said.
Rehearsals have shown the play’s impact reaches far beyond those with the lived experience of eating disorders.
“Even people who haven’t struggled are moved,” Rivera said. “Every so often, an actor will tell me, ‘I need a moment.’”
Rivera’s path to the stage was almost chance. In high school, they signed up for visual arts, but the class was full.
“They put me in theater instead,” Rivera recalled laughing. “I was mad about it. Then the teacher said, ‘Wow, you’re really good at this.’”
That moment set Rivera on a path to double-major in theater and psychology at California State University, Fullerton.
Rivera is also Napa County’s poet laureate, an honorary role appointed by the Board of Supervisors to promote awareness and appreciation of poetry. They grew up in Napa, graduating from New Technology High School in 2013 before attending Napa Valley College, then heading off to college in Southern California.
Their work often draws on their upbringing as a queer Latine with immigrant parents, blending those intersecting experiences and identities into their poetry.
After the upcoming production, Rivera plans to take a much-needed break. They will then begin developing a play centered on the lives of housekeepers.
For now, Belly of the Beast will premiere on Aug. 16 and 17 at the Potrero Stage in San Francisco.
