CHAD Opens in Philly Tonight.

InterAct Theater’s production of The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity opens tonight.

Today, I did an interview on WHYY, alongside Juan Pacheco (Mace) and Tony “Hitman” Stetson (wrestling consultant).  It’s pretty awesome, I think.

Chad Deity on Twitter.

Real-time results for chad deity

1. HotTix We just added tickets for Richard III, Death of a Salesman, and Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity. www.hottix.org 39 minutes ago from web
2. ThtrBob New EDGE review: The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity @victorygardens http://tinyurl.com/yhetaxh @kristofferdiaz 41 minutes ago from web
3. queeneulalia @Miss_Lilly_2U fair enough. here’s a quick video review of ‘chad deity‘: http://tinyurl.com/yhuj74a 42 minutes ago from web
4. kurmanstaff #Winner RT @prcindy: Don’t miss “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity” @VictoryGardens, by Kristoffer Diaz. Brilliant. http://j.mp/2MxE6D about 3 hours ago from Tweetie
5. katchicago sees the influence of the House Theatre of Chicago in ‘The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity.’ But I could be wrong. about 12 hours ago from web
6. kurmanstaff RT @prcindy: Don’t miss “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity” @VictoryGardens, by Kristoffer Diaz. Brilliant. http://j.mp/2MxE6D about 13 hours ago from Tweetie
7. Otis923 if u live in Chi-city, go see “Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity” at Victory Gardens. AMAZING! about 13 hours ago from mobile web
8. prcindy Don’t miss “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity” @VictoryGardens, by Kristoffer Diaz. Brilliant. http://j.mp/2MxE6D about 13 hours ago from Tweetie
9. prcindy “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity” @VictoryGardens, by Kristoffer Diaz Brilliant. http://j.mp/2MxE6D about 14 hours ago from Tweetie
10. jmwescott RT @kristofferdiaz you don’t have to be a fan of norway’s royalty to like hamlet. you don’t have to like wrasslin’ to like CHAD DEITY. about 15 hours ago from web
11. kristofferdiaz you don’t have to like cats to love CATS. well, maybe you do. but you CAN’T be CHAD DEITY. so just come see it. about 16 hours ago from web
12. kristofferdiaz you don’t have to be a drunk white man to like long day’s journey (but it helps). you don’t have to be latino to like chad deity. about 16 hours ago from web
13. kristofferdiaz dear theater aud: you don’t have to be a fan of norway’s royalty to like hamlet. you don’t have to like wrasslin’ to like CHAD DEITY. about 16 hours ago from web
14. MattDans I’m excited to be part of this production as ASL master. “The Elaborated Enterance of Chad Deity” http://twitpic.com/lsiwl about 19 hours ago from Echofon
15. aredorchid Josh the Intern admits that he used to be a big-time wrestling follower, so he is really excited to see CHAD DEITY by @kristofferdiaz ! about 22 hours ago from web
16. hatch3 Not exactly a wrestling fan, but I’m looking forward to checking out The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity tonight about 22 hours ago from TweetDeck
17. sridharisreddy Fellow Chicagoans, partake in some amazing theater: THE ELABORATE ENTRANCE OF CHAD DEITY. http://www.victorygardens.org/content/node/1321 about 22 hours ago from web
18. halcyontony @kristofferdiaz as a kid who didn’t even have the AWA toys, I really enjoyed Chad Deity. about 23 hours ago from TweetDeck
19. victrygardngeek The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity (Teatro Vista @ Victory … http://bit.ly/2jPX1U 1 day ago from twitterfeed
20. kristofferdiaz thanks, Bob! RT @ThtrBob “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity” @victorygardens — FANTASTIC. 1 day ago from web

Real-time results for chad diety

1. RiverNorthChi RT @prcindy: Don’t miss “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Diety” @VictoryGardens, by Kristoffer Diaz. Brilliant. http://j.mp/2MxE6D about 14 hours ago from Tweetie
2. prcindy Don’t miss “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Diety” @VictoryGardens, by Kristoffer Diaz. Brilliant. http://j.mp/2MxE6D about 14 hours ago from Tweetie
3. mreida I didn’t know there was that side RT @halcyontony: Why is no one is mentioning the Teatro Vista side of Chad Diety co-production? 1 day ago from TweetDeck
4. halcyontony Why is no one is mentioning the Teatro Vista side of Chad Diety co-production? 1 day ago from TweetDeck
5. lemmie581 chad diety tonight! going to the job fair! collen’s a crack whore. 2 days ago from txt
6. a7xsweethrt17 Wrestling play! Say hello to Chad Diety =). 4 days ago from txt
7. ellenwillett Chad Diety is worth every good review it gets. Rockin’. http://bit.ly/49VOFI 9 days ago from web

The Wire: Season 1, Episode 8.

S1E8
“Come at the king, you best not miss.”

Apologies for such a long gap between essays – the day job has turned into a day and night job over the last month and half or so. I’m back in Minneapolis now, so I’ll be diving right back into my coverage of the best show ever.

I know people who’d argue that Seinfeld is the best show in the history of television. I’d strenuously object for a number of reasons (not the least of which is this Danny Hoch story). I often think of Seinfeld as the anti-Wire (not in terms of quality – it’s a great sitcom, to be sure): where the former is the “show about nothing,” The Wire is the show about everything, arguing, in a nutshell, that to understand any aspect of big city living, you need to understand all aspects of big city living. That level of understanding is, of course, an impossible pursuit, which is probably why so many folks find it easier just to worry about Seinfeldian minutiae. The world is too big for us to have any meaningful control over the big picture, the argument goes, so why not focus on the small things we can control: minor imperfections, small hiccups in our everyday ease and comfort. It’s simpler, and often more productive, to complain about our inability to find our car in a parking lot than about the impossibility of stopping the drug trade.

When you’re engaging in this kind of tunnel vision, what you’re actually doing is creating a system, a means of framing a larger conversation into something more manageable. Most cop shows frame their conversations around the problem of solving an individual case: Person X committed Crime Y and is therefore a bad guy, Officer Z’s job is to capture the bad guy. The root cause of the crime is unimportant because the system is reductive – if you did something bad, you’re bad and deserve to be caught. It’s the way the police system works in real life too – digging deeper only leads to problems, because you start to discover things that the system can’t control.

For example: Regular Baltimore police do buy-and-busts. They stay on the street level. It’s not entirely effective – it doesn’t stop the drug trade, doesn’t stop the violence – but it works within the framework of the system the city has created. The goal of the buy-and-busts is not to stem the tide – it’s just to bust the dealer. The system that has been created is one that frames the conversation in a very particular, manageable way: there are drug dealers. We can put them in jail. The more we put in jail, and the faster we put them there, the better we’re doing.

McNulty’s detail (and yes, Daniels runs it, but it’s McNulty’s) tries to disrupt the system. They realize that the conversation needs to be reframed. There are drug dealers because there is a drug supplier somewhere. There’s someone who runs this crime organization. If you find the head of the organization, you get a whole ton of dealers off the street, and you stop the murders that come along with that drug trade. But you can’t find that head with buy-and-busts. You need to dig far deeper. So they do. And what happens when they dig deeper? As Kima says “we thought we were gonna come up with drugs – got money instead.” They realize that the path towards finding the head is not through the drugs, but the money – because the head knows that there’s a system in place too, and he knows that by staying out of potential buy-and-busts, he can’t be caught. So they follow the money (and here’s where we finally get to episode eight).

Following the money leads the detail to someone who’d never get caught in a buy-and-bust, and he happens to be the driver for Clay Davis. And suddenly, one step removed from the simple, contained, buy-and-bust system, the detail has discovered something unexpected and much more difficult to control: possible political involvement and corruption. Yes, the detail is trying to stop street level crime, but they’ve stumbled across the unspoken and overwhelming dirty secret at the heart of the system: street crime can’t really be stopped without implicating folks in powerful places, and that’s why these conversations need to be framed small. Burrell states this fact in so many words: “I asked you to put a charge on a drug dealer.” He wanted his employees to handle a very specific situation in a very specific way within a very specific situation. Instead, he got sprawl. His employees – who are detectives, meaning that their very job is to dig deep – dug a little too deep, poking a hole right through the wall of the system’s delicate infrastructure.

The challenge for Daniels and his team is to know exactly how well his bosses actually want them to do their jobs. Bosses don’t get to be bosses because of exceptional skill at doing the job; they’re elevated because of their skill at managing the system. And therein lies the problem: the police system was created to solve the crime problem, which was, of course, the ultimate mission of the police department. Over time though, the mission of the police department became to best serve and maintain the system. The system can best be maintained by focusing only on what it can control. Clay Davis is not something the system can control.

Whew. I’m not sure I even (a) said what I actually wanted to say there, (b) made any sense, or (c) actually addressed the episode at all. So I’ll do that now with three quick hits:

*The scene with McNulty and his kids in the market says so much about this character: he’s trained his kids to play front-and-follow so effectively that he can put them to work in actual criminal investigations (and they know to get a plate number) – and he’s so obsessed with the job that he sees nothing wrong with that. He cares about the kids enough that he panics, deeply and truly, when he can’t find them, but he’s so self-absorbed that he can’t even describe what they’re wearing.

*Even when Wallace is all but destroyed – getting high and sleeping all day – he’s still the parent in his household, helping the runts with their math homework. And it’s a truly great scene: the kid can’t do math out of a textbook, but put the word problem in the form of a question about the count, and he can rattle it off in his head, because if the “count be wrong, they fuck you up.” There’s nothing at stake in the American education system (ah, that word again), so failure becomes an easier and more seductive option. And of course, that’s all just set-up for season four.

*And then, just as you’ve watched eight episodes of deep social commentary, eight episodes of systems breakdown analysis, of interconnected relationships and other heady intellectual goodness, you get a legitimate, jump-out-of-your-seat visceral moment: Stinkum and Wee-bey go to kill Scar, but Omar gets the drop on them, killing Stink and wounding Bey. We’ve added a whole other kind of layer of tension here, the reminder that yeah, we’re thinking about structure and institutions, but there are still guns involved, which means, yeah, everyone’s in constant danger of being shot. The Wire may be a high-culture novel, but it’s also a low-culture action movie.

But take a closer look at what’s actually going on in that shootout: Stink and Bey are off to claim new territory the way they always do: roll up on someone weaker, take him out, take over. The Barksdales have a system, and it works. But Omar – Omar’s something their system can’t control.

The Chad Deity video promo.

Now this is cool.

Front cover of the Chicago Tribune. Above the logo.

Oh, We’ve Got Balls.

I stumbled across this post today.  It doesn’t mention our show directly, or at all, really.  But it’s all about having balls and taking risks in theater — and the picture just happens to be from Chad Deity.  Interesting.