Kristoffer Diaz
Geffen Playhouse artistic director Randall Arney continues his love affair with his former theatrical home Chicago as he imports playwright Kristoffer Diaz, director Edward Torres and several original cast members for the West Coast premiere of The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity.
In Chicago,Victory Gardens Theater’s premiere of the play at the Biograph Theater won spectacular reviews, Jeff Awards for the production and the playwright, and extraordinary audience responses. After a move to New York, Diaz was nominated for a Pulitzer and won an Obie. It’s a remarkable record for a writer’s first full-length play.
In 2008 Diaz, who had never had a professional production of his work, heard of a competition for “playwrights of color under 40” and sent in his manuscript. The competition was the Victory Gardens Theater’s first Ignition Festival, described by the company as “a pipeline to production for the work of young playwrights of color. By providing this platform for the next generation, Ignition launches new writers into the national spotlight and continues Victory Gardens’ core mission of originating new plays that serve diverse communities.” Out of 120 submissions, The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity was one of two plays to be workshopped and premiered at Victory Gardens.
The play mashes two of Diaz’s favorite but disparate art forms: hip-hop and professional wrestling. The first director had to bow out, and Edward Torres, artistic director of Teatro Vista which co-produced, joined the project. With little time to prepare before beginning work with actors, Torres was grateful to have Diaz close at hand through the rehearsals. Diaz recalls, “I was allowed to be a big part of the conversation. The two of us, along with the actors, worked together in a majorly collaborative way to help refine the text. Most changes were about shortening and tightening. We’re still making changes in rehearsals for the LA production.”
Terence Archie and Desmin Borges in "The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity"
Wrestling was Diaz’ first entree into the world of theatrics. He grew up a half hour from Manhattan and was frequently taken to see wrestling live at Madison Square Gardens, where he soon began to figure out that it was staged. “Even at an early age, you start to get a sense that there are certain physical things in wrestling that wouldn’t happen in real life. If you pull the back of a guy’s head and walk down the aisle he doesn’t have to go with you. You realize there is a different suspension of disbelief. I was always interested in the kinds of wrestling companies that seemed more a sport than a soap opera. WWF [World Wrestling Federation], now WWE [World Wrestling Entertainment], was always very much about cartoon style. I enjoyed that but I preferred the National Wrestling Alliance, which later became World Title Wrestling. I was a total sports fan.”
When he found himself in the theater, wrestling seemed a natural for his first major play. “I wanted to write about something I knew, and I knew a lot about pro wrestling. I never worked in wrestling, but I studied it. In the late ‘90s wrestling started to be a little more open about what was behind the curtain. A fair amount of information is available, whereas 10 years earlier everything was cloak and dagger.”
Usman Ally and Desmin Borges
As he developed the script he began to see beyond the excitement of wrestling and into the darker areas. “I realized that as much as I enjoyed it as a form, I also had a problem with it in terms of falling short of its storytelling potential. It was always coming back to the same archetypes, which didn’t always make room for the kind of folks I am interested in following. My artistic sensibilities come from hip-hop, and I was a New York inner-city teacher in a school that was interested in social justice. So I was trying to balance my interest in bigger political ideas with this sort of low-culture art form that had a lot of odd politics that could often be racist and homophobic. I was trying to make heads or tails of how I could believe in the things I do and still be interested in wrestling as a form.
“Exploring something makes it easier to accept. I don’t think I came up with any final answers, but… I love the fact that it looks really violent but is actually groups of men working together to protect each other, telling a violent story but nobody really gets hurt. I was also fascinated with something so popular, wondering how it is important to explain what is happening in the United States, even if it doesn’t seem to be directly making those kinds of cultural comments.”
Terence Archie
The theatrical medium is a tricky one for Diaz. His experience growing up near Broadway and seeing hundreds of plays as an NYU student led him to a concern about who audiences were. “They always looked the same – came from seemingly similar cultural backgrounds. I’d come to a Broadway show wearing my hip-hop attire – baggy jeans, hooded sweatshirt, big pair of boots – and feel out of place. But at the same time I’d be seeing everything from August Wilson to Guys and Dolls to Shakespeare and could appreciate it all. So I felt if I could create something that would appeal to a lot of audiences, then I’d have something special. At the end of the night, if I have a 16-year-old kid and a 75-year-old-woman who have very different excited responses to the show, maybe they could share those responses and really begin a conversation.”
Clearly the audience and critical appeal for The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity was a success in the eyes of the Pulitzer committee. Diaz was on a plane from Chicago to New York for a rehearsal when the announcement came. “I got off the plane and my phone started buzzing. Good things are happening right now. When the play started in Chicago we were really excited about it. Then the Chicago press started saying incredible things about us. The feedback was amazing We were confident about what we were doing, but you never know what’s going to happen when it gets in front of an audience and the critics.” But he never dared dream of a Pulitzer nomination. “In New York the following year a lot of doors were being opened for me and the actors. I had been in theater for five or six years and I had good connections. People were always saying they’d love to work with me, but suddenly those ‘future’ conversations became ‘present’ conversations.”
Usman Ally
Diaz was more than happy to walk through the opening doors. His name is now mentioned alongside playwrights he has revered for years. “David Henry Hwang is one of my great idols. M. Butterfly is one of the few plays that changed my life. Now I know him and consider him to be a friend and colleague.” Diaz is working on several commissions from major theater companies, including another collaboration with Torres and Teatro Vista to play at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre as well as two plays for New York Public Theater.
On this coast the Center Theatre Group has commissioned a play that is becoming extremely timely. “About two young women in the US who accidentally start a revolution and take over the world. A few days after our first workshop, the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions started happening. Then everything got shaken up and I had to put it away. When I started diving back into it, the London riots started to happen. I didn’t know these things were going on in the world to such an extent, so that play is a little up in the air as I am trying to make sense about what is actually happening and catch up. But it is going to be exciting. Theater is not always timely because of the means of production, but it feels like we have stumbled onto something.”
Terence Archie and Justin Leeper
He is also excited about his inclusion in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s “American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle,” the festival’s ambitious commissioning effort that plans to premiere up to 37 plays about American history by disparate American playwrights during the next decade. This puts him in league with such major writers as his idol Hwang, Paula Vogel, Robert Schenkkan, Lynn Nottage, Suzan-Lori Parks and the team from Culture Clash. Diaz laughs, “I have no idea what it will be yet. I have so many things I want to write about: hip-hop, sports, pop culture, the American drug trade.”
In his ecstatic review of The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity’s world premiere, Chicago Tribune critic Chris Jones made a major prediction: “It is the only play I’ve ever seen that could simultaneously appeal to fans of the World Wide Wrestling Federation and intellectual progressives (not that those groups are mutually exclusive). Heck, this killer show whipped the opening-night audience into a frenzy not seen at the Biograph since John Dillinger left the building [the gangster was shot to death there, in one of the venue's earlier incarnations]. It will appeal to anyone who thinks that theatrical food for thought is always best dispensed with a good, swift kick to the head. If Kristoffer Diaz’s The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity does not become a hulking hit for Victory Gardens this fall, and rapidly move on to bigger match-ups beyond Chicago, you can come right over and kick me in the head and stomp on my stomach.” Apparently Jones is safe!
The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, presented by the Geffen Playhouse. Written by Kristoffer Diaz. Directed by Edward Torres. Previews: Tuesday, August 30 – Tuesday, September 6. Opens September 7. Tickets: $37-57 for previews; $47-77 for regular run. Tues.-Fri. 8 pm; Sat. 3 pm and 8 pm; Sun. 2 pm and and 7 pm. Through October 9. Geffen Playhouse, 10886 LeConte Avenue, Westwood. 310-208-5454. www.geffenplayhouse.com.
***All “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity” photos by Michael Lamont
