‘The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity’ @ Circle Theatre
Photos by TayStan Photography
—Jan “The Claw” Farrington
Circle Theatre’s wildly fun pro-wrestling play The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity will get the blood pumping, dazzle the eyes and ears, and unplug most of your brain (temporarily, we hope). It isn’t a matter of giving permission for that to happen. Chad Deity just is.
Kristoffer Diaz’ outrageous Pulitzer-Prize-finalist play (directed by Alejandro Saucedo with fight direction by Ashley White) is at once a comedy and a serious dig at U.S. myths, dreams, and illusions—and boy, do we come down on the side of the myths and illusions. Before we know it, we in the seats are reflexively pumping our fists to a chant of “USA! USA!” —and then wondering, um, what exactly are we rooting for?
Bright lights, wrestling promo spots, and video cams keep us in the moment, with full-blast rock and country music. Hype and hoopla are shouted into a mic that makes every word echo. And in the center of a square ring (covering most of the stage) is our guide Macedonio Guerra (Alex Rocha), a Mexican American/New Yorker whose job it is to make talent-short “star” wrestlers like the great Chad Deity (Nate Davis) look like champs. Brown-skinned Mace does the “heavy lifting” for less pay and little fame. And, if our brains are still connected, we’ll think…well, isn’t that typical?
But he seems to love the job. As a kid in the Bronx, Mace plus “my brother and my brother” watched WWF pro wrestling, and his younger sibs loved the rubbery toy figures of the WWF stars. Mace was into the smaller action figures you could actually pose and play with—and fascinated by the calculus of wrestling, the plans and moves that made things happen. No wonder he’s reasonably content to be the brains of the outfit, even if the teeth-flashing, ripped Chad gets the girls and the money.
Running Mace’s work life (he thinks) is bombastic, cigar-chomping impresario Everett K. Olson (Brett Warner is a hoot as the canny “EKO”), head of “THE Wrestling,” a competitor to the big dogs. EKO knows his business: find button-pushing pair-ups of Good Guys and Bad Guys to get the crowd roaring. As the generic brown “other,” Mace plays a string of beatable Bad Guys, with David Saldivar playing “Old Glory,” “Billy Heartland,” et al.
The balance of power shifts when Mace meets “VP” (Prem Desai), an Indian American guy raised in Brooklyn, whose confident personality and patter seem ready-made for the ultimate Bad Guy. VP (actual name Vigneshuar Paduar) speaks English, Spanish, Hindi, Urdu, and some Mandarin/Russian/Polish/Italian. He could be any “other” the audience wants, though EKO can’t think farther than calling him “The Fundamentalist.”
I love scripts where you don’t know what characters will say next—and Diaz’s conversations between Mace and VP are especially sharp and fun to follow. Rocha is a compelling actor, as is Desai (plus Davis as Chad Deity—all shiny smiles and preening poses). We’re kept amused by Mace and VP’s ever-changing choices about what is (and isn’t) a demeaning sell-out, a stereotype too far.
White’s fight direction (and the actors’ all-in commitment) pay off in lots of muscular and believable action. Hope Cox’s costumes are a riot, from Chad’s gold lame trunks to Mace’s outfit as a Che/Castro/Communistic wrestler who goads the crowd. Tony DiBernardo’s compact coliseum set distills the action for max energy, augmented by exciting lights (Jamie Milligan), sound (Claudia Martinez), and projections (Garret Thompson).
In quieter moments, Mace always has something to say. He mentions that masks in wrestling are a “sanctified” tradition in the Mexican version of this sport/spectacle. And he says, more than once, that pro wrestling in the US (he notes there is no country named “America”) is an ultimate expression of “the ideals of the nation.”
Lord help us.
WHEN: October 3-26, 2024
WHERE: Circle Theatre, 230 W. Fourth Street, Fort Worth
WEB: circletheatre.com
