Philadelphia Weekly

Battle locale: VP (Shalin Agarwal, left) and Macedonia Guerra (Juan Pacheco) fight title character Chad Diety.

Hip-hop theater takes a big step forward with Kristoffer Diaz’s dynamic new play The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity , which is getting its regional premiere in a fine production from InterAct Theatre Company.

Director Seth Rozin’s staging of Entrance marks the first time since 1997 that InterAct has presented a production away from the company’s artistic home at the Adrienne. It doesn’t take long to figure out why. The moment you enter the space you encounter a regulation size wrestling ring inhabited by two wrestler/actors pounding on each other. Not that namby-
pamby Greco-style wrestling, but rather the made-for-TV brand popularized by Vince McMahon and his promotional company World Wrestling Entertainment.


Set in and around the ring, Diaz’s satire focuses on Macedonia Guerra (Juan Pacheco in an impressive professional stage debut). Known as “Mace,” Guerra is perhaps the most likeable narrator since Thornton Wilder’s stage manager in Our Town . He also happens to be Puerto Rican, which makes him a likely candidate to play a villain in Everett K. Olson’s (Jeb Kreager) jingoistic wrestling empire. 


Mace is an excellent wrestler, which ironically is a liability to his economic success. In pro wrestling, the winner (i.e., the good guy) can only succeed with the help of the loser (i.e., the villain). “You can’t kick a guy’s ass without the help of the guy’s ass you’re kicking,” says the reigning champ Chad Deity (Donté Bonner). Deity doesn’t have Mace’s athletic skills, but he is charismatic, good looking and extremely muscular. In an image carefully cultivated by Everett, Deity is an all-American hero who likes nothing better than to kick the ass of villainous “foreigners” who are paid to fall at the champ’s feet.


The newest challenge to Deity’s crown comes from a swaggering Indian named Vigneshwar Paduar (an impressive Shalin 
Agarwal). A legend on the basketball courts in the Bronx, VP trumpets India as the new world power. Like Mace, VP has been ostracized in the U.S. due to his race and nationality. Culturally ignorant but financially savvy, Olsen casts Mace and VP as wrestling’s newest scoundrels with Mace playing a Mexican revolutionary named Che and VP a Taliban-loving terrorist with a vague Islamic/Muslim/Socialist/Middle Eastern background called “the Fundamentalist.” To wrestling’s flag-waving fans, Mace and VP’s wrestling personas are the embodiment of evil, and a match is set between the Fundamentalist (who flattens opponents with a devilish kick known as the “sleeper cell”) and the heroic Deity. 


Rozin’s blisteringly paced, razor sharp production captures the play’s hip-hop rhythms and sense of moral outrage, forcefully depicting America as a parasitical consumer that routinely exploits less powerful nations and peoples. 


Both funny and smart, Entrance is the rare play that makes us laugh and think at the same time. America has real enemies in the world, but in Entrance it’s our need to stereotype alleged outsiders as a threat that emerges as the true danger. ■