Los Angeles Times - Highly Recommended
"..."The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity," Kristoffer Diaz's vibrant play set in the wacky world of professional wrestling, seems tailor-made for people who find contemporary drama dull, staid and more or less irrelevant. This satirical work, which opened Wednesday at the Geffen Playhouse, leaps out of the proscenium frame at every opportunity, exhorting, drop-kicking and body-slamming its way into an immediacy that is more familiar to sporting events and rap concerts than to a traditional night of theater."
LA Weekly - Highly Recommended
"...Though buoyed by an outstanding ensemble, it is Borges' spirited and captivating portrait of the artist as a frustrated storyteller that carries the show. Director Edward Torres' taut staging rarely falters in a production graced by Brian Sidney Bembridge's wonderfully hyperbolic wrestling-ring set, Jesse Klug's glitzy and glossy lights and costumer Christina Haatainen Jones' marvelously kitsch creations."
Backstage - Highly Recommended
"...It's unlikely we'll see any offering this season that remotely resembles playwright Kristoffer Diaz's balls-out theatrical happening. His vision is flamboyantly brought to life in collaboration with Edward Torres' electrifying direction, an inspired design team, and an energetic and committed cast. Contemporary America isn't literally a wrestling arena, where Diaz's metaphor-rich story takes place, but the playwright almost convinces us it could be. This ingenious play serves up a steaming pot of cultural tension, political allegory, scathing social commentary, and unbridled hilarity, set against the gaudiness and fakery of professional televised wrestling. The razzle-dazzle elevates the play's enjoyability, adding a gaudy sheen to a lacerating tale of crass commercialism and narrow-minded stereotyping gone amok."
Santa Monica Mirror - Recommended
"...Guided by the superb direction of Edward Torres, Kristoffer Diaz's "The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity," 2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Drama, hit the Geffen Playhouse with a thunderous body slam, dazzling the senses with a profusion of sights, sounds, and crisp dialogue that could be described as brilliant prose poetry."
LAist - Recommended
"...Between the brightly costumed wrestlers making their elaborate entrances down the aisles, the effective use of slick videos, the periodic powerbomb or clothesline, and the occasional audience interaction, even the most worn-out audience member rushing from work on a Wednesday night will feel enlivened by the electric energy in the theatre. The Geffen has once again staged a world-class production of a fun – and important – play."
Edge - Highly Recommended
"...With this wildly talented cast and crew and with professional wrestling as his fugue theme, Diaz spins a lithe and peripatetic tale that is less play than burlesque, more Swift than Shakespeare. He is unchained from many theater conventions by the very theatricality of wrestling itself, and he uses this dispensation to range far and wide into the nature of heroism and hucksterism. What develops from such freedom is the polar opposite of a play within a play: it becomes the audience observing an audience."
Stage and Cinema - Highly Recommended
"...Playwright Kristoffer Diaz has an ear for unleashing the poetic possibilities in "street-smarts" vernacular; and director Edward Torres has an eye for how to turn a simple idea into an explosively theatrical metaphor; and, together, they have made of Diaz's hip-hop comedy The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity a mostly wondrous carnival of a show."
StageHappenings.com - Not Recommended
"...That said, while I could appreciate many aspects of the play including the set, the spectacle, and the acting, overall I was less than thrilled at this loud, obnoxious and obvious play."
ArtsBeatLA - Recommended
"...Diaz's funny and often exhilarating play has energy, heart and power, blasting out the occasional shot of adrenaline, and how often does an evening of theatre really give you that?"
Campus Circle - Recommended
"...Full of insulting yet hilarious wit, "The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity" will leave everybody entertained."
