A Welcome development

“It was the kind of viewpoint I was hoping to see: someone talking about race, ethnicity and power without going exclusively through the lens of historical grievances,” Aaron Carter says. “It felt really present, really contemporary.”

Carter, the literary manager for Victory Gardens Theater, is describing his first read of Kristoffer Diaz’s The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, which Diaz submitted to VG’s inaugural Ignition: Emerging Writers of Color. Deity went on to become one of two Ignition scripts opening Victory Gardens’ current season. A savvy, hilarious and heartfelt tale of race and professional wrestling, Chad Deity marked Diaz as an exhilarating new voice. (TOC named it the top production of 2009, and it was revealed this week as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in drama.)

The production will be reprised at Manhattan’s Second Stage starting April 26—New York native Diaz’s first full production on his home turf—and another Deity opened last week at Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis, where we phoned him. This week, meanwhile, American Theater Company opens Welcome to Arroyo’s—the long-gestating premiere of Diaz’s first play, which he’s been working on for close to a decade.

“Everybody said, ‘We love this play, it’s different, it’s blah-blah-blah, and we don’t know how to produce it or sell tickets to it, so we can’t do it,’” says the 32-year-old, now a writer in residence with Deity copresenter Teatro Vista.

In Arroyo’s, Lower East Side bar owner Alejandro and his teenage sister Amalia are mourning the recent death of their mother; they meet Lelly, an exurban Puerto Rican scholar in search of a forgotten figure from the early days of hip-hop. A pair of DJs played by GQ and Jackson Doran serve as a chorus.

“This play was supposed to be my, like, reckoning of my own relationship to being Latino in New York City, and Latino and a fan of hip-hop,” says Diaz, who grew up mostly in Yonkers but spent time with cousins in the Bronx and his grandmother on the Lower East Side; he discovered theater in high school (“anybody who is the weird, awkward anything in high school stumbles into theater”). “It became this fun relationship play between this brother and sister.”

“What this play is dealing with is this whole new generation of people who are a mixture of racial identities,” says ATC ensemble member and Arroyo’s director Jaime Castañeda. “Kris and I are adamant about this idea of a new kind of theater that speaks to other communities. Chad Deity has all these racial politics cooking underneath it, but it’s different from the older generation of writers who broke through who were closer to that immigrant movement. He’s just a whole new voice. He comes at [everything] from, like, four different angles.”

For Diaz, who has a graduate degree in dramatic writing from NYU and another in performing-arts management from Brooklyn College, engaging a new generation of theater audiences is “the million-dollar question,” he says, noting it’s not as easy as setting up a Facebook page. “We’re trying to figure out ways to develop relationships. It’s not just, We want you to pay your money and come see the show. There’s got to be some back-and-forth.

“We have to drive home the fact that theater’s a conversation in a way that film and television aren’t,” he continues. “I think that’s what young people—eh, who knows what that means, ‘young people’—I think that’s what people who aren’t coming to theater are looking for.”

Despite his fierce New York pride, Diaz now has deep Chicago ties: He’s in negotiations for a commission from a Chicago theater he declines to name, as well as another in-the-works project with Teatro Vista. “I think there are people who are waiting to see what happens when Arroyo’s opens in Chicago and Chad opens in New York,” he says. “The trigger will be pulled in the next month or so.”

Arroyo’s begins previews Thursday 15 and opens Monday 19.

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