Wrestlers! Mayhem! My Review

chaddeity6d4e401a-6742-11df-a932-00144feab49aThe FT has published my review of the new off-Broadway play, “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity.” Full text after the jump.

Macedonio Guerra, the Bronx-born Puerto Rican played by the explosive Desmin Borges in Kristoffer Diaz’s The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, sprays his monologues with gusto and glee, but his rapid-fire verbal rhythms point up a challenge: how can a non-musical play incorporate hip-hop-style rhythms effectively?
It’s a problem that has bedevilled the theatre almost since the moment the genre was hatched three decades ago: the rapid-fire delivery of an expert MC creates propulsive excitement, but, shorn of a bass beat, words in a similar vernacular may go at such a clip that meaning is lost.

But even if Macedonio’s speed isn’t always ideal for conveying Diaz’s story, even if storytelling in general is something the playwright is still mastering, the excitement of Chad Deity, directed with precision by Edward Torres, is nevertheless palpable. An array of techniques – live video, cinematic sound effects – is marshalled to create an evening that is often entertaining and always alive.

Diaz takes aim at the racial and ethnic stereotypes embedded in American mass culture, and he does it in an arena that couldn’t be more lowbrow: professional wrestling. In the brightly-lit world of his wrestling-league employer, Guerra is the guy who takes the fall for the muscle-bound African-American champ, Chad Deity, until one day an Indian from the neighbourhood – Vigneshwar Paduar, given a sly performance by Usman Ally – shows up to pose a threat to that reigning god.

With sometimes heavy-handed self-consciousness, Diaz pokes fun at his own tendency to use wrestling as a metaphor for almost everything, especially political fakery and economic globalisation, but his handling of all the implications is frequently adept. Paduar allows the wresting promoter, Everett K. Olson – the commandingly voiced Michael T. Weiss – to repackage him as a Muslim terrorist type of limited intelligence: this in spite of the fact that Paduar speaks several languages and has charm sufficient to coax a dog from a meat locker.

There’s something enormously fresh about the use of wrestling – which, along with its cousin, extreme fighting, furnishes some of the highest-rated programmes on American cable TV – to score socio-economic meaning. The genre has for so long been enrolled to showcase lovable losers (think Mickey Rourke, and, decades before him, Wallace Beery) that I was dubious as to whether Chad Deity could find anything unusual to say about the sport. But it does. FOUR STARS OUT OF FIVE

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