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.

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

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.

Now this is cool.

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.

I’m not sure we’re officially open for reviews, but you gotta love bloggers who are excited about what they see. Here are some highlights:

The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity by Kristoffer Diaz is the play we saw and I’m still catching my breath. I have never believed an actor more than I believed Desmin Borges as Mace. Except for how much I believed Usman Ally as Vigneshwar Paduar.

…

I left breathless and it took me an hour to catch my breath. A day later, thinking about the final scenes, my chest tightens again. This show is brilliant. This show will win award after award after award. You need more from me than that, don’t you?

…

(and this is my favorite) When he breaks through the fourth wall and we react to him – the way we’re supposed to – you see that the character is tickled he’s having that response. (It’s like when the kids have to clap to wake Tinkerbell up, but better).

We’ve got a long way to go, but it’s nice to see that some people are digging it already.

S1E7
“A man must have a code.”

There are scenes in The Wire that make me want to write pages and pages of analysis and close reading. There are also scenes that are simple and quiet, beautiful in their details engrossing in their heartfelt emotion. Episode 7 contains three of these moments:

*Bubs, who previously used his connections with Kima to get Johnny out of jail (how exactly is that different that anything Valchek does in terms of suction?), accompanies Johnny to his court-mandated recovery meeting. The meeting is heartfelt, genuine, and moving in its simplicity. We watch people cheering for sobriety, we hear the personal stories, we see the step-by-step nature of what recovery actually entails. It’s a great scene, and one that makes it easy to see how Bubs can imagine salvation out of that moment.

It’s also important to note that when Bubs accompanies Kima to the court, he wears a tie. He’s an addict, but he’s got a clear moral compass (a code, you might say).

*The set-up to capture Bird is elaborate and intricately planned. Every cop from the detail is involved, heeding Omar’s warnings that Bird won’t hesitate to fight back. He never gets a chance. Bubs sets things off, running the red hat trick to identify the target, and Lester and Sidnor spring into action undercover. It’s a marvel of pre-planning, and it’s one of the rare moments in The Wire when everything goes according to plan.

*And then the heartbreaker, the first of many: Wallace getting high. No words in the scene. No words are needed. It only took seven episodes for the show to hit us with our first tragedy – and it’s a true tragedy. We love this kid. We remember at all times that he’s just a kid. And we understand exactly what has him heading down this road.

On my first several passes through this episode, it always struck me more as a series of these individual moments than some of the more intricately connected episodes that clearly adhere to a theme. The theme thought is actually crystal clear, and overtly stated (as usual) in the title card dialogue snippet: this is an episode about codes. Early on, we get more of Pres and his code-breaking abilities – more than the ability, it’s his love for it that matters here. It’s this love for codes and problem-solving that leads him to education, which is what leads us, blissfully, to season four.

The show-opening quote is actually referring to a whole different kind of code though – the moral code by which a man’s got to live his life. It’s Omar who brings this perspective to the table (although it’s Bunk who says the line). Omar acknowledges that he does bad things – hell, Omar basically acknowledges that he might be a bad person – but there are limits and laws by which he lives. He’s got a system, you might say. In terms of foreshadowing, this little conversation is a big one – I’m immediately thinking of Marlo, and I’m thinking of a scene late in the run (season five, I believe), when another character (who has already been introduced) rails against Marlo’s lack of code. And I won’t say any more, because we’re not in the spoiler business here.

Part of Omar’s code involves never turning a gun on a civilian – someone outside the game. The implication is clear (and maybe even overtly stated, although I can’t remember): if you make the decision to get into the drug trade, you’ve got to be ready to take whatever comes along with it. By the end of the episode, it’s clear that Omar’s code is shared by the police as well. When Bird is brought in for interrogation, which is fine and well and good and smart, really – if I’ve learned anything from these shows, it’s that you never say a word while you’re in the box. Bird says words though – lots of angry, unpleasant words – and ends up suffering for it, taking a beatdown at the hands of Kima, McNulty – even Daniels and Landsman get in on the action. And yes, Bird is a criminal, and a douchey criminal at that, but we’re talking about a four-on-one asskicking of a handcuffed, unarmed man. In no uncertain terms, we’re watching the good guys – our god guys – being bad. And maybe it’s a person of color thing, maybe it’s the history of police brutality and closed doors assaults that’s left a bad taste in my mouth, but man, I can’t write that off as acceptable behavior.

And here’s why The Wire is so effing brilliant. I’m a huge fan of The Shield. The strike team on that show does stuff like this all the time. And we cheer for them. They’re terrible people doing bad things in service of a really great moral code. With them, the ends justify the means. And what’s great about The Shield (and I’ll try to state this as spoilerlessly as possible) is that while it’s celebrating these bad guys, it’s taking a clear moral stance: no one who gives in to that approach to the world ultimately gets off unscathed. You will get punished. Good will win out.

On The Wire, good may or may not win out. Sometimes, you might just get away with doing something horrible.

S1E6
“All the pieces matter.”

If you’ve never seen The Wire before, episode six starts with a mutilated dead boy on the hood of a car. It looks like a million other cop shows, albeit maybe a touch more graphic than most. After a few seconds of looking at the body, it’s basically forgotten for a few minutes as we go off and follow another character entirely. That second character eventually comes back, stands over the scene as cops start their canvas, and is visibly moved by the gore. The opening credits roll. It’s sensitive, to be sure, and a slightly different perspective than most police shows, but you don’t quite get the sense that it’s one of the most brilliant sequences in the early days of the best show in the history of television.

But it is.

When you’ve watched The Wire sequentially (especially if you watch it on DVD in rapid succession, the way most people watch it these days), you know right away that the mutilated dead boy is Brandon, even without getting a good look at his face, because (a) he was caught at the very end of the last episode and (b) he has been previously condemned by Avon to be displayed “like a deer” as a message to Omar. You don’t even need to see his face: oh shit, that’s Brandon, and oh shit, this all just escalated.

When you’ve watched the entire series and are coming back for more, it’s easy to see that this is a gigantic moment – beyond a gigantic moment, really, as it shifts Omar from bad-ass stick-up boy to all-out Barksdale enemy, seeking retribution both out of and inside the legal system. It’s his involvement in the legal case that allows the detail to make actual and lasting progress, and when you think about, that speaks volumes about the way police work gets done; good cop or not, you kind of have to hope that something happens in the life of the criminal that’s going to help lead you to his capture. We’ve never (as far as I know) seen a police show that addresses this angle. It’s not about super cops coming up with the ah-ha moment that breaks a case wide open. It’s about police doing the hard grunt work to get close, and hoping that you get a little luck (and in this case, that luck comes in the form of a mutilated dead boy).

So that’s the first two seconds of the episode.

And then.

The camera trails up to an extension cord (a wire, let’s call it what it is) plugged into a street light (giving us a sense of the poverty level in this, a major American city), then follows a second extension cord (this is not an unusual thing in this neighborhood) through a shattered pane of glass (broken windows theory?) to a clock radio that immediately explodes into action (the first real sounds of the episode), waking up Wallace (who, by the way, happens to be responsible for the mutilated dead boy, but has no idea what’s waiting mere yards from where he sleeps), who is fully dressed (in what appears to be school clothes, although there’s no indication he ever goes to school – and oh, by the way, that’s foreshadowing of season four) and springs immediately to his feet – he’s got work to do.

We know Wallace as a corner boy, a pit worker advanced enough to handle the money but not cut out for much more in the game. Over the course of the next three seconds or so, we’ll see a whole other side of him – the side, perhaps, that fits him best – head of household. Wallace turns off the alarm (no snooze here), brushes his teeth (with a swig of bottled water – not only is there no electricity, there’s no running water), fixes a dangling extension cord in the hallway (more wires), bangs on Poot’s door to wake him up and drag him away from the (older white) woman in bed with him, and wakes up a room full of young children, yelling to them that if they want to stay out of foster care (and what great indictment of the foster care system can there be that it is perceived as a fate worse than, well, this? Oh, and by the way, season four.), they need to get their asses up and out to school. The kids all get up, Wallace gives them juice boxes and bags of chips for breakfast (although he doesn’t have enough for all of them), and off they go – Wallace even checks to make sure they’ve got their backpacks (although really, there’s not much he can do if they claim they didn’t get homework – he’s playing the parent role, but he’s really not a parent). And then, just for a second, he hears the approaching police cars, and he still has no idea why they’re approaching, but he looks out at them anyway – and my god, he’s so young. As everyone heads out to work and school, we see that they live in a boarded up building behind a door with a number to call if an animal is trapped (what about if a human is trapped?) — we’ll later come to call these vacants, and Chris and Snoop – I’ll say no more.

And once Wallace and Poot get outside, we’re snapped back into the reality of the present situation – we see Brandon’s face for the first time (missing an eye, at that) at the same time Wallace and Poot do. The police are taping off the crime scene and, as police do, joking about the gory nature of it all; later in the episode, McNulty will arrive on the scene, and jump out of his shoes when a dog barks at him. The detectives already on the scene laugh at his reaction, as does Poot, who’s watching from the window. There are some folks who can compartmentalize and even find humor in the face of such a tragedy. Then there’s Wallace, who simply isn’t cut out for this. His face upon surveying the crime scene is heartbreaking – he knows he led to this boy’s brutal, bloody death. He’s just a little kid. He’s not able to carry this. And we don’t know it, but this is all directly leading to some of the absolute best scenes in television history.

And then the opening credits roll, and the episode actually, you know, starts.

So in the last post, I came back to rehearsal to discover our ring, all constructed and ready to go.  And after a few days of playing with it, we came back after a day off to discover…this:

And yes, my mind is starting to be blown.

Not a great pic, but this is the frame for one of the two video screens that hang above the ring.

It takes a whole lot of paint to pull this back wall off.

And it's all got to be labeled to keep it straight. Graf and scorpions -- could we be any more masculine?

It's not in my contract that all my shows have to have some graffiti on the set, but it's getting pretty close.

No, wrestling fans, I didn't ask for this tribute to my favorite wrestler growing up, but it's nice to have the Stinger represented hard.

Our turnbuckles now have pads, and our ring mat now has a cover.

Soon, this will be a tiger. Maybe even by the time I get to rehearsal today.

And it's all overseen by the wrestling guys. Not dolls, not action figures. Wrestling guys. Corporal Kirschner, Tazz (WWF spelling), and...well, some guy. No one can figure out who he is.