Next Act’s Wrestling Play Is Fun Flashy Romp

Dimonte Henning, Adrian Feliciano, David Cecsarini and Vince “Demented Chucky Bates” Nygro. Photo by Michael Brosilow.

In a newsletter distributed in the Next Act Theatre lobby near a display of wrestling photos – and near a mock ring where lobby patrons can pose with a cutout of the muscular lead actor — several cast members and director Michael Cotey confess their childhood passions for the body slams, headlocks and showoff mannerisms of professional wrestling.

That early athleticism and relish in theatrical fakery have become their action-figure back story to careers in the arts. It’s good to remember, when attending Next Act, that Hulk Hogan was real to little kids before the Republican National Convention asked him to rip off his shirt.

Childhood dreams clearly led Next Act to pull out all stops with a flashy romp through the pro wrestling world in The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity.

The stage has become a fully operational wrestling ring. Pro wrestling videos from the eras of Ric Flair and Verne Gagne are pushed into double view on the screens behind the ring, with later videos shot live onstage and incorporated into the actors’ sneering closeups, along with a booming miked presence much like watching a match on TV with all that posturing and posing meant to stir up the crowd.

The flair (lower case this time) extends to how the actors incorporate violent pro wrestling moves and wrestling’s racist stereotyped characters into the tumbling action. The play has been around since 2009, but I doubt it has been done before with as much stage projection magic and love for the topic.

Director Cotey cleverly turns the usually sedate Next Act audience into pro wrestling maniacs who boo, cheer, stomp – and laugh as the play makes profane and important points about the Muslim, Black and brown caricatures that motivate the wrestling game.

The story is framed by the masked Mace, the muscled smallish Puerto Rican stooge, a lifelong wrestling fan who happily plays second fiddle to the charismatic Chad Deity, played with grin, smirks, winks and flexed chest nipples by a fine local actor, Dimonte Henning. In the story told by Adrian Feliciano as Mace, Chad may own the championship belt, but he can’t wrestle worth a damn — and then Mace, the savvy second banana, runs across a muscular motor-mouth from India, flamboyantly played by Levin Valayil, looking for a career.

Mace sells the idea of creating a new villain to dominating promoter and TV manager EKO (think Vince McMahon) who decides what the wrestling audience needs is a fundamentalist Muslim to hate.

EKO is a part deliciously played by David Cecsarini, who retired last year as Next Act’s artistic director. He’s gone whole hog into the role, with head shaved bald, ruddy face, CEO glee and greed and mastery of the echo chamber.

He’s not the only good actor. Henning provides many deft touches as the strutting Chad. There is also nice presence (and probably some training on how to take a fall) from Vince Nygro who is actually a local wrestler (under the name Demented Chuck Bates), who in this play keeps reappearing in new disguises as The Bad Guy, destined to take brutal (if comic) falls in planned matches.

The narration and the frequent tumbles fall to the flexible Feliciano, the sad sack whose other role in the ring is a hated Mexican in a sombrero (an inside joke about how pro wrestling can’t tell one brown skin from another).

Feliciano is onstage too often, handling all manner of physical agility. The audience wants his sad sack manner and gibes to work, but playwright Kristoffer Diaz wanders around unfolding his tale and the actor mumbles some killer lines he should isolate.

The pyrotechnics feel right for this show, but the author puts too much of a dialogue burden and too many contradictions on the Mace role, with more repartee than the actor can manage.

The patrons, who become willing rowdy spectators at the wrestling ring, have the tables turned on them in the finale when forced to recognize the real human heroes in the ring. It is a needed conclusion – almost a Marvel Comics turnaround back to reality – that the production struggles too long to find.

But despite those caveats, this is an engaging show, with so many technical tricks that we can’t name all dozen of the important backstage participants – and we shouldn’t give away some of the touches.

The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity runs through October 6, but Next Act is building promotional events out of the production, including a free 6 p.m. block party, with Third Ward food vendors, after the matinee on Saturday Sept. 21, outside the theater at 225 S. Water St.

The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity Gallery

 Dominique Paul Noth served for decades as film and drama critic, later senior editor for features at the Milwaukee Journal. You’ll find his blog here and here.