You can’t describe “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity” without resorting to exclamation points, and lots of them. There’s an actual pro-wrestling ring onstage! A video clip shows a woman in a burqa wielding a nunchuk! A beefy guy spins out a hilarious monologue about raisin bread! A wrestler named Old Glory gets a roomful of New York theatergoers to chant “USA! USA!”
If this feels breathless, so is this dynamite show, which is like Tarantino tackling the WWF.
Except that while playwright Kristoffer Diaz shares the filmmaker’s gift for snappy dialogue, action sequences and pop references, he avoids Tarantino’s callous hipness.
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“Chad Deity,” the Pulitzer Prize finalist that opened last night at Second Stage, is more than just catchy visuals, laugh-out-loud lines and steroid-juiced guys executing powerbombs. It’s a real story — full of heroes and villains, though you can’t tell which is which. That’s part of the fun, and part of the moral.
Our motor-mouthed narrator is The Mace (Desmin Borges), a diminutive fighter who’s meant to make ring hero Chad Deity (Terence Archie) look good. The Puerto Rican, Bronx-raised Mace grooms his Brooklyn buddy, Vigneshwar Paduar (Usman Ally), to become Chad’s over-the-top foe: The Fundamentalist, a bearded terrorist “trained in the deadly MMA — Muslim Martial Arts.” Insert as many exclamation points as necessary here.
That these characters feel so genuine is all the more surprising — and canny of Diaz — because wrestlers are fakers, and their industry is about building myths that both anticipate and defy their fans’ expectations.
Wrestling is a metaphor for America, Diaz implies. It’s all about creating heroes and enemies by manipulating stereotypes, and turning the whole mess into pop-culture fodder.
Diaz has found the perfect accomplice in director Edwin Torres, who also staged the play (with the same cast) in Chicago. When wrestlers make their entrances, the stage explodes in a kinetic orgy of blinding lights and deafening music.
But Torres and his charismatic actors also bring out the text’s smarts and emotions, without making them preachy or treacly. Like the best wrestlers, they know that, in the end, it’s all about delivering high-impact entertainment.
elisabeth.vincentelli
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