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http://www.observer.com/2010/culture/coal-miner’s-son
The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity
By Jesse Oxfeld
May 24, 2010 | 11:28 p.m
THE ELABORATE ENTRANCE of Chad Deity, which opened last week at the Second Stage Theatre, is a very different kind of celebration of the working man. It's a high-energy, highly theatrical comedy set in the energetic and theatrical world of professional wrestling. It's loud and witty and aggressive, but it's also a sweet and moving story of a Joe Sixpack-granted one who works in tights and a mask-who keeps getting clothes-lined by the self-interested self-promoters who run his WWE-like employer, called THE Wrestling.
The play is narrated by a journeyman wrestler named Macedonio Guerra (Desmin Borges)-"the Mace"-a Bronx Puerto Rican who appreciates the fine art of scripted grappling. Mr. Borges had used wrestling to lift himself out of poverty; he's a dedicated THE employee who's happy to lose to the baby-faced champ, the All-American Chad Deity (Terence Archie), who always enters the ring elaborately.
But when he meets a trash-talking Indian-American Brooklyn basketball star known as VP (Usman Ally), he sees a way to make the two of them stars. THE's chief, the Vince MacMahon-like Everett K. Olson (Michael T. Weiss), sees only two brown-skinned performers, and, knowing his audience's tastes, turns the Indian into an Arab and the Puerto Rican into a Mexican, together an odd but appropriately menacing "Axis of Enemy Combatants" (the French are somehow involved, too).
Playwright Kristoffer Diaz delivers a steady pounding of virtuosic jabs. He lampoons the buffoonery of pro wrestling; he gives Mace deliciously complex narrative soliloquies; he also makes the whole thing a microcosm of how the country works. It's surely no accident that the public face of the machine is a charming and handsome, articulate and nonthreatening black man, or that Everett K. Olson, like Roger Ailes, solves any situation by packaging the other as an enemy and bringing out the Stars and Stripes.
There's a wrestling ring onstage and huge video monitors above it, and director Edward Torres nimbly moves his actors in and out of that ring and into and out of the cartoonish idiom of pro wrestling. The cast, largely new to New York, is deeply charismatic and very funny. The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity is-sorry for this-a knockout blow."
