Kristoffer Diaz, the New York-based playwright behind the Pulitzer Prize finalist “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity”—opening at TheatreSquared stage this week—sounds excited when he talks about the prospect of his show opening on stages outside of major urban centers.

“I’ve made art in New York for the vast majority of my life, and it’s always great to do that, but you also hope the play impacts people, and you can be preaching to the choir a little bit,” he says during a phone interview from his New York home. “Sometimes, you can be singing a song that you already know is going to resonate with certain folks, and it’s cool to think about how it’s going to land in a place where maybe people have come to it from different perspectives, and the audience demographics are going to look different than what they do in New York.”

“Chad Deity” director Dexter Singleton has little doubt that Diaz’s play will hit Northwest Arkansas audiences as positively as it did those in the big city.

“This is a great play to introduce people to theater, people who have never seen a play before,” he notes. “Because it’s not just a ‘sit there and be quiet’ type of play. You can yell, you can scream, you can do all of that and be engaged, just like you would be at a wrestling or another sporting event.”

In this corner: Macedonio Guerra

Diaz’s show is a hyped-up, whip-smart take on the world of professional wrestling in all of its glory—and all of its cynicism, racism, and xenophobia. Main character Macedonio Guerra has been a wrestler for an organization called THE Wrestling for decades. He’s talented as “the guy who loses to make the winners look good”, dooming himself to a career as second banana. He’s also a witness to the constant barrage of racist, offensive typecasting that befalls all people of color in the organization. But Guerra’s love for the sport, which started when he was a young child, is too strong for him to be able to muster the will to walk away.

Diaz has loved the sport of wrestling as long as Guerra, and Guerra’s conflicting feelings echo his own.

“The secret of writing is that all characters are stand-ins for the writer at all times,” he says. “You get to portray whatever sort of conflicted feelings you have about anything, about the world, by creating characters who think the same thing. Mace is definitely one of the two or three characters that I’ve ever written who is directly based on my emotions towards things—yes, professional wrestling, but also about the American theater, also about the American political system at the time, also about race. For me, pro wrestling was a super easy container for those things for me to write about, because it was my favorite thing for probably the first 15 years of my life. So you get to explore these complicated topics with something that you’re really passionate about.”

“Overnight success”

Diaz laughs when asked if he was taken by surprise when “Chad”, his first professionally produced play, became an overnight success.

“It took seven years to become an overnight sensation,” he says. “I’d been out of graduate school for that long and had written a few plays that were sort of bubbling around in literary managers' offices and things like that, but nobody had ever really taken the jump. We got produced at Victory Gardens in Chicago, first as part of their Ignition Festival, which was a festival for new plays, written by writers of color under the age of 30— I kind of snuck in at 29. We did a development workshop there. And it went really, really well. And then that led to a second workshop that was one of the best experiences that I've had in the theater. Everything was clicking on all cylinders, and I think we kind of knew, pretty early on, that we had something that we thought was pretty special—but we had no idea if audiences were going to dig it. So that was the big shock, that audiences and Chicago critics really ate it up. We sort of hit the lotto numbers in the process—we had the right people at the right time. So it felt really great.”

Evergreen themes

The show debuted in Chicago in 2009, and, a dozen or so years later, its cultural and social critique remains as relevant than the day it first hit the stage—if not more so. Diaz says it’s an observation that’s been made in many of the interviews he’s sat for over the years.

“Yeah, I don’t know,” he muses. “It’s hard. I think that things do, and don’t, change. I’m a professor at New York University, and, among my students, the way they think about race and gender has evolved in a bunch of different ways. Yes, we’re much more polarized in the United States, but I think a lot of that has to do with the loudness of social media. I don’t know if it’s worse now than it was 15 years ago. It’s certainly not worse than it was 40 years ago, so we have progressed, and I do think it’s important to keep that in mind.

“Identity, race, and ethnicity, and somebody just wanting to do the right thing amidst all of that—that’s always going to be relevant to somebody.”

“I think that it’s great writing, and great writing is timeless,” says Singleton. “The best writers of our generation, their work, like a lot of artists, will live through generations. This is another example of that. Theater is here to stay, and pro wrestling will be around forever. And when a play is timeless and touches on themes that people can connect to and are familiar with, those are things that are going to live forever. Issues around race, class, and culture are always things that are going to be talked about and always are going to be things that are important. Unfortunately, until we really choose to tackle some of those important social issues directly, we’ll still be talking about these same topics 20, 30, 40 years from now.”

“Chad Deity” and Northwest Arkansas audiences

When audiences watch Diaz’s play on stage in T2’s West Theatre, they’ll be watching the culmination of weeks of relentless, body-aching training completed by the cast under the tutelage of professional wrestler (and “Chad” cast member) Alexander Gold.

“Soreness, crying, prayers, FaceTime calls with my family asking, ‘What am I doing?’” says Cedric Leiba, who places Macedonio in the T2 production, when asked how training has been going. “But TheatreSquared has been amazing about providing services for us and making sure we're taking care of ourselves. We have to show this kind of work in order to tell the story truthfully and authentically.”

The environment of the grand West Theatre has been completely transformed by the show’s set: The regulation-size wrestling ring surrounded by audience seating will most certainly make ringside viewers feel as though they’ve been transported into the world of professional wrestling. Video monitors showing dramatic footage, confetti cannons, electrifying projections, vibrant lights and fog machines are the perfect icing on a show that includes both talented athletes and gifted actors.

“I really think it's going to be unlike any show that a TheatreSquared audience has ever seen,” says Singleton.

Meanwhile, back to how Diaz feels about seeing his show performed in communities like Northwest Arkansas, where theater is not always easily accessible, and, when it is accessible, is not always reflective of the population it serves.

“I know that there are people of color everywhere, and I know that there are little kids, who might be Puerto Rican kids or Latino kids or Indian-American kids who might come in and say, ‘Oh yeah! I didn’t know people were making stuff like this. I didn’t know this was out there. I didn’t know I could do this. I didn’t know I could see myself on stage until this moment,’” he says. “You hope that happens. And, at the same time, you hope that somebody who never thought about the fact that you could have this young, Indian-American, hip hop-influenced kid who is one of the main characters in this play—that folks like that existed. Maybe that opens that person’s mind, changes the way they think about the world a little bit.

“It’s important, I think, to put work in front of folks who maybe don’t come from the same place that you do.”

Pulitzer Prize finalist Kristoffer Diaz on "Chad Deity"