Smarkland: 'The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity'

Toward the end of The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, one of the characters watches his friend in a wrestling match on TV while lying in bed with a girl. When the girl gets up to go to the bathroom, she warns that something more real best be on the television when she returns.

The lack of factuality in wrestling is often a complaint raised by people who don't see the appeal in grown men tossing each other around in their underwear.

Professional wrestling isn't a sport. It's sports entertainment.

That means the outcome is usually decided before the first piledriver is thrown. Meanwhile, professional wrestlers are as much (or perhaps more) coveted for their looks and ability to communicate a storyline as they are for their actual wrestling skill.

People who like sports where two teams compete in a physical contest that is not predetermined often hate this. But wrestling provides plenty of surprises and outsized happenings to get people hooked.

Wrestling fans love everything surrounding the main event. With the outcome a foregone conclusion, it's the showmanship and the unintended effects of bashing people around that the audience is on the lookout for in a wrestling match. Some suit in upper management at a wrestling franchise may determine which of his characters wins a given match, but that doesn't mean that the people in the ring aren't doing some pretty dangerous shit.

Chad Deity knows this. The play, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize this year, focuses on a wrestler working in the fictional wrestling franchise THE Wrestling.

Desmond Borges plays Macedonia Guerra (aka Mace), a Puerto Rican wrestler from the Bronx who spends his time in the ring making other wrestlers look good. He's rather wiry for a pro wrestler, but he's not supposed to be a power player. (And he'd probably be prone to more injuries than your average wrestler in real life. Did you know that large muscles actually cushion wrestlers during falls? Probably. But this is the first I'd heard of it.)

It's possible that Mace has never won a professional wrestling match. But he plays the important role of jobber at THE Wrestling. As Mace points out, losing a wrestling match is a lot harder than it looks, and getting driven into the mat actually takes a lot of effort.

Mace is there to make big players like Chad Deity look good. Chad Deity (Terence Archie) is one of the "faces" at THE Wrestling. He's a great-looking black guy with huge muscles who talks about himself in the third person. (Speaking of which, if you want to see Chad Deity refer to himself as Chad Deity, you'll have to do it quickly. The play ends its run at 2econd Stage Theater this weekend.)

For boys who grew up playing with wrestling dolls (ahem, figures) and dreaming of busting folding chairs over the heads of their friends, Chad Deity is a staged wet dream. Mace easily guides the audience through the world of wrestling-its elaborate storylines, distorted political conflicts, and behind the scenes drama.

For those who are confused as to what about spandex outfits, jingoist stereotypes and excessive displays of testosterone makes grown men fork over money for predetermined pay-per-view shows, Chad Deity does a pretty great job unpacking its appeal.

The audience at Chad Deity, while getting schooled on the ins and outs of the business, also has a role in the play. Like audience members at a real live professional wrestling match, viewers at Chad Deity are called upon to cheer, boo and take sides. When Borges says "The crowd gasped," everyone gamely obliges with sound effects.

That's the same way it works at live wrestling events. Without an audience, it's just a bunch of grown men in tight clothes play-fighting. But audience reaction is what they're playing for. Whether they're villains (heels) or heroes (faces), the men in the ring are carefully attuned to the way people react to them.

And audiences are always getting smarter. That's why the word "smark" exists. Smark is a wrestling term for a certain kind of fan. Viewers who believe in the spectacle on stage are known as marks, which is a common phrase for someone who is easily duped.

But at Chad Deity the audience is in on the joke. You're taken through the marketing that informs wrestling storylines and the profit motive that creates different characters.

And while theatergoers may enjoy the distance that gives them from actual wrestling fans, it's not actually much different from the way it works at live wrestling matches. Wrestling fans aren't all duped by the fakery on stage. They acknowledge that real people exist behind those masks, and relish the blood, sweat, and tears those entertainers put into their work.

Those are smarks (smart+mark=smark).

And if you strip away the spandex and the random ethnic stereotypes, that pretty much describes all of us.

Meghan Keane is hip to your tricks.