Making an entrance
Elizabeth Kramer reviewed the Actors Theatre production “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity” on the C-J site today. The play is narrated by a pro-wrestling underling named Macedonio Guerra, who believes in wrestling as an all-American art form with the power to tell true stories. Guerra’s grace and skill in the ring, however, are wholly devoted to making sure the headlining wrestler, Chad Deity, looks good. As the plot develops, Guerra sees an opening to create a new storyline for himself and his fast-talking friend from New York, V.P. They’re frustrated, however, by the grotesque stereotypes that their ignorant boss forces them to pantomime–Guerra is given the role of a sneering Mexican revolutionary, complete with bullet belts, and the Indo-American-Brooklynite V.P. is remade as the Fundamentalist, a cartoon of an Islamic terrorist. In her review Elizabeth writes, in part:
The script, which was a finalist for a 2010 Pulitzer Prize, has zingers that present opportunities for the performers to strut their stuff, both figuratively and literally. The results are often hilarious, and the audience at the Thursday performance was lapping it up and laughing at some of the over-the-top antics.
I also saw the play last night, and can affirm that the audience was very, very responsive. I find audiences in Louisville, on the whole, a highly enthusiastic bunch–they seem to be enjoying themselves more than typical audiences in other cities I’ve lived in, and performers appreciate it. In this case, though, the actors seemed to be rushing in to deliver their lines over the crowd’s cheers and laughter, losing important bits of dialogue. This was odd, since the play explicitly calls for audience participation–and Actors has planted volunteers in the rows to incite cheering and boos.
And the actors in this production certainly earned the audience’s enthusiasm. The play demands both good comic delivery and some pretty impressive gymnastic feats–this is, after all, a play about pro wrestling, and, yes, there are on-stage fights. Elizabeth disliked the use of video screens and some of the staging, but to me the video succeeded in jogging my memory of what pro wrestling actually looks like on TV–wobbly handheld work, lots of sweaty closeups, dumb graphics. My only quibble with the technical aspect of the show relates to the sound mix–some dialogue, music and effects are delivered on-mic, as if to an arena audience, while the rest is off-mic, and the resulting dynamic yo-yoing hurt the audibility of some lines.
It’s a bit of a risk, staging a play about a sport that (it’s probably safe to say) few ATL patrons pay much attention to. Although the play satirizes pro wrestling, it does ask us to believe, with Guerra, that it has some genuine beauty–even if that artfulness is buried under layers of crass commercialism and hokey spectacle. The plot twists in the second half felt nearly as melodramatic as the outre narratives played out in the ring, however, and Guerra’s redemption is related second-hand, by V.P.–this seems odd, since Guerra has been such a reliable and verbose narrator of his own story up to that point. But ultimately, the play seeks to affirm Guerra’s belief that pro wrestling, for all its artifice, can tell us a real American story about hard work, ambition, passion and the power of money.
