InterAct's "Chad Deity'

Wrestlers are the Rodney Dangerfields of professional sport. They don't get no respect, for what seems an obvious reason: Professional wrestling isn't a legitimate sport. When they step into the ring, the story line, script and outcome have already been determined in advance.

On the other hand, as Kristoffer Diaz points out in The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, it takes a remarkable combination of athletic and dramatic talent to be slammed repeatedly onto the floor while simulating emotions that you don't really feel. If we appreciate this "art of making beautiful balletic brutality" in ballet dancers, why not in wrestlers?

Such is the lament of Diaz's alter ego, Macedonia Guerra (played by Juan Pacheco), a wiry, street-smart Puerto Rican from the Bronx who has perfected "my villainous skill set" but envies the adulation heaped upon the designated black champion, Chad Deity (Donte Bonner), who is actually an inferior wrestler. "In wrestling," Mace explains, "you can't kick a guy's ass without the help of the guy whose ass you're kicking."

To be sure, Boris Karloff and Vincent Price carved glamorous and lucrative careers for themselves by playing nothing but villains. But you don't unnastan'. Mace coulda been a contender, if only there were something here to contend for.

Danger at ringside

Like the best professional wrestlers, the six male actors in Chad Deity— each of whom is slammed to the mat at least once in the course of the evening— possess notable talents both as actors and as athletes. They're engaging fellows who understand how to beat each other up and make it look real— especially Pacheco, Bonner and Shalin Agarwal as Vigneshwar, an Indian from Brooklyn who is added to the promotional mix as an "Islamic terrorist." Set designer Adam Riggar's red-white-and-blue wrestling ring dominates the small Shakespeare Theatre from the get-go, when the audience arrives to find two wrestlers practicing their moves.

Chad Deity is also an ideal vehicle for the earnest and noble-hearted InterAct Theatre Company, whose motto is, "Changing the world… one play at a time." In the past, that goal has usually involved presenting lectures disguised as plays. In Chad Deity, for a change, we have sport (OK, a faux sport) disguised as a play. Instead of actors beating you over the head to get out there and overthrow the system, here you have wrestlers beating each other over the head. That means movement on stage and even the excitement of potential danger for the ringside audience, at least for a while.

Like pornography

But ultimately Chad Deity suffers from the same problem that plagues professional wrestling: the sport's essential limitations. There are only so many holds, throws, bounces and kicks a wrestler can perform, after which things get monotonous, especially since Chad Deity offers only the thinnest of story lines. It's sort of like attending your first pornographic film: The first five minutes have you gasping in disbelief, the next five are fascinating, and thereafter it's all been there-done that.

Once the novelty of encountering wrestlers in a theater has worn off, Chad Deity reverts to that old InterAct standby: didactic preaching to the audience. In a true land of opportunity, we are led to believe, minorities wouldn't need to earn their living by banging into each other in front of paying audiences. In such a utopia, presumably, Mace and Chad and Vigneshwar would enjoy more fulfilling lives as accountants, insurance agents and stockbrokers.

The fighting dentist

Please, give me a break. Pro wrestling and other sports have traditionally offered the underclasses a stepping-stone up from coal mining and dishwashing (which in turn offered them a stepping stone up from starving and fleeing). And astonishing as it may seem to Kristoffer Diaz, some people who work in sports don't do it for the money.

My distant relative Louis "The Fighting Dentist" Wallach (1886-1957), for example, financed his dental education by boxing some 150 matches under the name of Leach Cross. But long after he'd established a prosperous dental practice with a side income in real estate, Leach Cross returned to the ring at age 45— just to prove he could still do it.

For pithy insight into the exploitive nature of American capitalism, Chad Deity could learn something from the black comedian Dick Gregory. "America's the land of opportunity, all right," Gregory used to tell audiences half a century ago. "Where else but in America could a guy like me be forced to take the worst jobs, live in the worst neighborhoods, send my kids to the worst schools, sit in the backs of buses— and get paid $5,000 a week to talk about it?"♦


For another commentary and video interview by Jim Rutter, click here.