Los Angeles Theater Review: THE ELABORATE ENTRANCE OF CHAD DEITY (Geffen Playhouse)

WHEN YOU USE MACE, USE WITH DISCRETION

Playwright Kristoffer Diaz has an ear for unleashing the poetic possibilities in “street-smarts” vernacular; and director Edward Torres has an eye for how to turn a simple idea into an explosively theatrical metaphor; and, together, they have made of Diaz’s hip-hop comedy The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity a mostly wondrous carnival of a show. I use the word “mostly” advisedly because, just beneath the surface of this slap-happy satire on the absurd world of professional wrestling, there lies a dead-serious look at our entire culture. Here is a play that burrows deep into the American conscience by showing us, with luminous lucidity, how, in our dumb acceptance of the myths society creates for us, we gladly give up looking into who we really are and what, as human beings, we are capable of. The notion here is that we are complicit in defining the stereotypes of ourselves that drive us mad but with which we are forced to live.

But, hey, until that idea gets summed up a bit obviously and tidily in its final moments, Chad Deity is the wildest and most outrageously comic entertainment that the Geffen Playhouse has given us in years. It might even be said that that a play like this openly defies the expectations of a subscription audience, which, more often than not, feasts upon comfort food.

You would think that the whirlwind of excitement that is whipped up would make it impossible to even imagine that we are, in fact, squirming uncomfortably at the deeper implications of the play that are omnipresent even as the noise and the splatter of the ringside shenanigans keep us in a constant state of happy surprise. But squirm we must; it seems part of Diaz’s design.

Images of the wrestling world are not only recreated but, as might be expected, are re-imagined as a spectacular one-ring circus in which anything flies and everything bursts in mid-air. It looks so easy, it must be fun.   And it must be what attracts so many people to wrestling in the first place. But it could just as easily be war that is on display, a war in which only egos are destroyed. Did I say “only?”

At the center of all this is Macedonio Guerra (not Chad Deity, despite his elaborate entrance), who is known simply as Mace, the better to identify the potential danger he represents. Mace is the Bronx-raised Puerto Rican who has to look bad in order to make Deity, the reigning champion, look good, and who goes into the ring looking like a mariachi singer, jewel-studded and sombrero-ed, and who trains other wrestlers to eventually go up against Deity. His newest trainee is an Indian, Vigneshwar Paduar, whose wrestling persona is The Fundamentalist, done up with bogus Bin Laden-like whiskers, so that he is both a villain and a joke. Deity is an African-American whose muscles do not stop and who can make his breast muscles, in particular, do a hooch dance that is a certifiable crowd-pleaser. Before The Fundamentalist can face up to Deity, he must first get into the ring with Billy Heartland and Old Glory, a couple of good old white boys who, at the moment, are not quite as popular as Deity…which may, of course, be a temporary thing, if you’re interested in drawing analogies between the characters Diaz has created and the current political atmosphere (which is, of course, surely intentional). These caricatures are money-makers which EKO – the head of the wrestling organization that sponsors and profits from these cartoonish depictions of American types – clearly wants to keep in place because they “sell.”   EKO sounds suspiciously like a cross between a cardiogram and the CEO of a corporation. In his head, they may be a wrestling team, but, make no mistake, they are the United States of America in microcosm.

But it’s Mace you need to keep your eye on – as if you can do anything else, since Desmin Borges, who portrays him, is giving one of those “you’d-be-crazy-to-miss-it” performances. The play is his; without giving anything away, his ultimate victory is hard-won and profoundly satisfying. The guy is cool and hot at the same time, an avalanche of furious fast-talking and wild-eyed risk-taking. And, though too much talking to the audience tends to make this particular reviewer wonder if there is anyone who can write a play anymore in which characters actually talk to one another, it is staggering to watch the energy and intensity Borges brings to the dazzling verbal riffs Diaz has written for Mace and which makes him so compelling and dynamic a man (and, when push comes to shove, so vulnerably human).

Borges, excellent as he is, is just one member of a uniformly sensational cast. Terence Archie’s Deity brings an hilarious edge to sexual bravado; Usman Ally’s Paduar stays just shy of heartbreak as he slowly moves towards self-realization; Steve Valentine’s EKO blares his way through one cockamamie speech after another with deafening smarminess and an insincerity that would be even funnier than it is were it not so pitch-perfect.

What a grand old time the production team must have had dreaming up and executing the whole damned thing.   Brian Sidney Bembridge’s set design and Christina Haatainen Jones’s costumes are just right; Mikhail Fiksel’s sound blasts you out of your seat and Jesse Klug’s lighting is, at times, furiously blinding. (At the performance this reviewer attended Peter Nigrini’s video projections were not operating as fully as intended, which in no way affected the power of the play.)

The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity is ultimately more about class and race than it is about wrestling. But its greatest achievement is in forcing us to ask questions about the roles we play in maintaining the status quo at the expense of human development.   How many new American plays can you name that have done anything so rich and complex and still manage to be so rousingly funny?

harveyperr @ stageandcinema.com

photos by Michael Lamont

The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity
scheduled to close October 9
for tickets, visit http://geffenplayhouse.com