The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Diety

(This is Jordan's post.)

The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Diety was written by Kristoffer Diaz.  It premiered at Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theatre on September 25, 2009.   Since then, it has been performed off-Broadway and at regional theatres in Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Washington, Dallas, Louisville, and Charlotte.  The play received the Obie Award for Best New Play, the National Latino Playwriting Award, and the New York Times Outstanding Playwright Award.  It was also a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, but it lost to Next to Normal. 

Kristoffer Diaz holds a BA from New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, an MFA from NYU's Department of Dramatic Writing, and an MFA from Brooklyn College's Performing Arts Management program.  His full-length plays include The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Diety, Welcome to Arroyo’s, and Guernica.  He is a playwright-in-residence at Teatro Vista, and he is a recipient of the Future Aesthetics Artist Regrant and the Van Lier Fellowship for New Dramatists. 

The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Diety is about the inner-workings of a fictional wrestling organization known as THE Wrestling.  The main character is Macedonio Guerra, a Latino jobber who goes by the moniker of “The Mace.”  He is at odds with his ignorant boss and the hyper-charismatic African-American Chad Diety, who is a terrible wrestler.  Macedonio attempts to bring in a highly charismatic local Indian pick-up basketball player named Vigneshwar Paduar, but the boss of THE instead teams Macedonio and Vigneshwar together as a group of mysterious, silent terrorists, with Vigneshwar as the wrestler and Macedonio as the manager/speaker.  However, Vigneshwar freezes up every time he is in the ring, and he eventually quits THE Wrestling.  At the end of the play, Macedonio unleashes a venomous monologue about the current state of wrestling and how he only wants to tell a beautiful story, and the THE boss tells Macedonio to say this on camera.  In the epilogue, Vigneshwar Paduar narrates this event to the audience as he watches on television with a lady.  After Macedonio’s inspired statement, Chad Diety comes onstage and defeats Macedonio in near-record time, and the audience cheers, to which VP’s girl friend says, “Why are they rooting for the bad guy?”

1) What is the significance of Macedonio’s extended monologue at the beginning of the play? He even states “None of this is even the point of the story.”  Why is that?

2) How does this play benefit by the highly presentational narration?  What would the play be like if it weren’t led along by Macedonio’s snarky asides?

3) There are many real-life representations of characters similar to these in professional wrestling.  The wrestler most often referenced in the play is Muhammad Hassan, an Arab-American stereotype who debuted in the WWE in 2004 but whose career was destroyed after a controversial “terrorism” storyline.  Chad Diety himself is modeled after The Rock (although don’t start thinking that The Rock couldn’t wrestle), and Macedonio’s early career is very similar to the early careers of Latino wrestlers such as Rey Mysterio and the late Eddie Guerrero.  What do all of these modern allusions to actual wrestlers add to this play about fictional wrestlers?

4) Is this play more scathing satire of professional wrestling?  Or does it exist more as a satire of race relations in the United States? 

5) Why is the epilogue narrated by VP? Throughout the play, Macedonio has been the only narrator, so what has changed by the end?

(This is Jordan's post.)