Kristoffer Diaz’s Body Slam to the American Dream (original) (raw)

Theater Review | 'The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity'

The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity Christian Litke, left, and Desmin Borges in this comedy by Kristoffer Diaz at the Second Stage Theater.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity

NYT Critic’s Pick

May 20, 2010

The fights are fixed, and the man-crushing body slams are faked. But the energy that radiates from “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity,” Kristoffer Diaz’s crazy-like-a-fox comedy about television wrestling, is the real thing. This delightfully muscular production, which opened Thursday night at the Second Stage Theater, courses with the vital sap of an able-bodied satire enjoying a rollicking love-hate affair with its subject.

Mr. Diaz’s play, an import from the Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago, hits the canvas in a frenzy of fancy footwork that doesn’t let up until its last 10 or 15 minutes. (That’s when The Message arrives, but never mind that for now.) As directed by Edward Torres, with a cast that couldn’t look happier being thrown about like sweaty rag dolls, “Chad Deity” is punch drunk on the adrenaline, verbal as well as physical, it brings to presenting an illusion-based sport as the true American pastime.

“Chad Deity” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in drama this year. And more than most works that make that short list, it fulfills the official desiderata that Pulitzer plays reflect and explore the American experience. In examining what happens before and behind the cameras at a company called THE Wrestling (as opposed to its near-identical twin, World Wrestling Entertainment), “Chad Deity” plumbs a United States that wallows in ready-made myths it doesn’t even believe in.

That includes the ideal of a happy, swirling melting pot of assimilated ethnic identities. As it tells the story of life at THE Wrestling through the eyes of a professional fall guy, Macedonio Guerra (Desmin Borges), “Chad Deity” considers how notions of race are manipulated, massaged, distorted and turned inside out in the name of violent but reassuring entertainment. Just so you know, the climactic fight that the plot builds to is between a beloved, strapping African-American wrestler the title character (Terence Archie), who has appropriated the opulent, money-flashing style of hip-hop kings and a swarthy, bearded nemesis whose nom de guerre is (wait for it) the Fundamentalist (played by Usman Ally).

Subtlety, obviously, is not among the virtues of “Chad Deity.” But then as Macedonio, better known as Mace, observes, TV wrestling is hardly a subtle sport. And if “Chad Deity” isn’t subtle, it is certainly ingenious in exploiting the entertainment value of the very pseudo-sport it mocks. In both its live depiction and recollected accounts of the season’s big matches, the show brazenly milks its audience for the exaggerated responses that this brand of wrestling is expected to elicit.

So when Mace, while guiding us through the phases of a particular match, says, “The crowd gasped,” the Second Stage audience obligingly echoes with a gasp of its own. Our complicity is similarly enlisted throughout the production, which sends its stars to strut their cartoonish stuff while dazzling us with bright lights and pulsing music.

The joke is that we’re in on the joke. But can’t that be said about the audience for television wrestling? Beneath its vigor and sparkle, “Chad Deity” harbors a zero-at-the-bone indictment of Americans who accept simplistic, easy-to-grasp and spurious images that they know have been manufactured. Heck, most of them know exactly how those images were created.

So does Mace, big time. He’s a Puerto Rican kid from the Bronx who grew up enamored of the televised wrestling scene. The plastic, muscle-bound figurines he played with turned out to be good preparation for the people he would work with later. Mace is now the guy who goes into the ring to make the other wrestlers the ones with more charisma but a lot less talent look good. For Mace, wrestling is an inspiring national ritual in which nobody gets hurt and is “one of the most profound expressions of the ideals of this damn nation.”

Mace isn’t the only guy around who talks in such a high-falutin’ way. Everybody in “Chad Deity” speaks in high-concept symbols, starting with the glamour boy Chad and the THE Wrestling entrepreneur, Everett K. Olson (an impeccably unctuous Michael T. Weiss), also known as E.K.O. The show scores resonant points in suggesting just how metaphor-driven this country is.

Which is not to say that we Americans are complex poets. On the contrary, the metaphors that Olson peddles, like those of most politicians, are primitive equations. The personas of Olson’s star wrestlers are embodiments of tidy cultural perceptions. Mr. Archie’s gleaming-toothed, limousine-riding Chad gives flesh to the comforting fiction that blacks have been thoroughly assimilated into the American dream.

That ethnic identity is never so simple in these United States is made evident when Mace recruits Vigneshwar Paduar (Mr. Ally), a young man from Brooklyn of Indian descent who speaks and acts (when he wants to) like a Chicano fly boy, and is also fluent in an assortment of other languages with matching poses.

This racial chameleon could be pretty much any national type, at least among those with darkish skins. And that’s why E.K.O. decides to transform him into the Fundamentalist, a robe-wearing Muslim whose specialty is the “sleeper cell kick” and who is advertised as a threat to all that Americans hold dear.

These amusing if obvious parodic elements couldn’t be sustained if the production didn’t translate them into such thoroughly theatrical terms. If Mr. Diaz’s breathless, pumped-up language incarnates the self-charging rhythms, hyperbole and surface spectacle of the world it portrays, so does nearly every aspect of Mr. Torres’s production.

That includes Brian Sidney Bembridge’s big-boy playroom of a set, Christine Pascual’s lurid costumes, Jesse Klug’s lighting, Mikhail Fiksel’s sound design and Peter Nigrini’s videos, which remind us of the mystical transformative powers of a television frame. The onstage fights, directed by David Woolley, feel as real as the real thing, which is pretty real for something that isn’t.

The cast members, who also include Christian Litke as a variety of archetypal American wrestlers, are all fun to watch. And in the pivotal role of Mace, who is haunted by the suspicion that he’s too smart to be doing what he’s doing, Mr. Borges gets us on his side from the first and keeps us there. This is true even when the play takes a turn into Clifford Odets-style earnestness at the end, a detour that is of a piece with the play’s theme but not with its jaunty, double-edged tone.

Up to then, “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity” (which deserves a more prepossessing title) has the delicious crackle and pop of a galloping, honest-to-God, all-American satire, a genre that seldom shows up these days. Like George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart in “Once in a Lifetime,” their 1930 play about that demented land of Hollywood, Mr. Diaz knows that it requires a well-armed cartoonist to take on a world populated by human cartoons. This vibrant young playwright speaks and revels in the hyperbolic language of caricature, all the better to undermine it.

The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity

By Kristoffer Diaz; directed by Edward Torres; sets by Brian Sidney Bembridge; costumes by Christine Pascual; lighting by Jesse Klug; sound by Mikhail Fiksel; projection by Peter Nigrini; fight director, David Woolley; associate artistic director, Christopher Burney. Presented by Second Stage Theater, Carole Rothman, artistic director. At the Second Stage Theater, 307 West 43rd Street, Manhattan; (212) 246-4422. Through June 20. Running time: 2 hours.

WITH: Usman Ally (Vigneshwar Paduar), Terence Archie (Chad Deity), Desmin Borges (Macedonio Guerra), Christian Litke (Joe Jabroni/Billy Heartland/ Old Glory) and Michael T. Weiss (Everett K. Olson).

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