Wheels are spinning
Performers will present Rec Hallipalooza: A Resilient Cuyama Drama on May 16 from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. The event is free to the public and takes place at Richardson County Park in New Cuyama off the Hubbard Avenue exit of Highway 166. For more information about Blue Sky Center, visit blueskycenter.org.
Tiny skateboard wheels spinning on cement deliver actors smoothly to their marks. In New Cuyama, this is theater. So is playing soccer, racing lawn mowers, and other community celebrations in the valley.
Residents are putting on an original production called Rec Hallipalooza: A Resilient Cuyama Drama on May 16. The outdoor performance moves through multiple community hubs and shares locals’ dreams, skills, and stories.
The show is made possible by a $100,000 grant from the Arts in California Parks program, which supports groups that use cultural storytelling to engage communities. The boots-on-the-ground efforts were organized by the nonprofit Blue Sky Center.
“It’s going to sort of be between a play and a parade probably because it’s going to be outside, and it’s going to be moving around,” Creative Programs Manager Liz Fish said. “There’ll be a lot of activity and a lot of movement.”
The parade style fits the feel of Cuyama: wide open and free. Scenes take place at the skate park, baseball and soccer fields, lawn mower racetrack, horseshoe pits, and the recreation hall. The audience moves with actors through each setting as they try to defeat the Big Lonely, a monster threatening community life in nearby towns. Characters realize how gathering in communal spaces helps cure social isolation.
There’ll be some recorded elements but not necessarily lots of scripted lines, although the cast of around 20 spent time rehearsing on Zoom. It’s likely that the cast will expand on production day when actors’ uncles, siblings, or friends decide they’d like to join in.
Rural community theater is a little bit different than in cities. In the Cuyama Valley, drama doesn’t have to be contained inside a building or on a stage. Soccer players and skaters can call themselves actors, too.
“That’s the fun thing about it, is it sort of touches on all these different interest points, and people can access something that is theater in a different way,” Fish said.
Blue Sky Center’s grant allowed the organization to commission two artists from PlaceBase Productions, a company that Ash Hanson started 14 years ago in her native Minnesota. Its mission is to produce plays for small, rural towns, listening to ideas from the community.
Hanson began working with Blue Sky Center right after the pandemic. This production will be the director’s fifth in Cuyama, but she and her collaborator, Alex Barreto Hathaway, produce two every year in various states. She knows that the arts can be a big support to small communities, having grown up in rural northern Minnesota.
“We’ve really fallen in love with that community, and they’ve also really taken to our process and approach to organizing around different topics through community theater,” Hanson said of Cuyama.
In every play Hanson writes and directs, whether it be in South Dakota, Colorado, or California, she makes sure the material is “hyper local.” That means going to all the hot spots, attending church, and sitting at the bar to talk with people about their hometown. Hanson wants to determine what the pressing topics are that the community wants to comment on through theater. She calls the result a site-specific production, like the name of her company.
“What futures are we imagining?” Hanson said. “That helps inform the script writing.”
Hanson helped write songs and oversee the script from her homebase in Utah. She visited Cuyama twice last year for the Rec Hallipalooza project and will return eight days before the May 16 performance.
“Basically, it’s a play in a week, but everybody will have already had access to the script. We’ve got a really solid team on the ground there who we’re going to work with that weekend to do the build day and make all the props,” Hanson said.
In such a large valley with only 1,100 residents, they can’t afford to be exclusive. Community theater in Cuyama accepts everyone’s help and embodies what it means to create an intergenerational project.
Take the young people, who wanted to shred at the skate park in New Cuyama but didn’t have equipment. Hanson helped rally gear donations from the Carpinteria Skate Foundation and the skate company Arbor Collective.
In March, Blue Sky Center and PlaceBase Productions hosted a two-day Skate Jam at the local skate park to help kids get more comfortable on their wheels. The community now has more than 20 sets of skateboards, helmets, and pads that skaters can check out from the Rec Center.
“We really tried to think about, ‘What is the long-term impact of the work that we’re doing?’” Hanson said. “Rather than just building a set in an auditorium and then tearing it down, what improvement can we make to these sites?”
The skateboarding scene is shaping up to be one of the most anticipated parts of Rec Hallipalooza. During the show, audience members will get to see performers acting, dancing, and skating at the same time, but the community’s new wheels will keep turning long after the play’s final scene.
Reach Staff Writer Madison White at mwhite@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in May 7 – May 14, 2026.