From Chris Jones's review in the Chicago Tribune:
"The juicy, knockout new play at Victory Gardens is at once a visceral take-down of the way American marketers manipulate our jingoistic tendencies, a hilariously savvy exploration of racial and class-based stereotyping, and a full-on, body-slamming theatrical wrestling match—replete with ring, klieg lights, and big, sweaty men body-slamming each other into the canvas.
It is the only play I’ve ever seen that could simultaneously appeal to fans of the World Wide Wrestling Federation and intellectual progressives (not that those groups are mutually exclusive). Heck, this killer show whipped the opening-night audience into a frenzy not seen at the Biograph since John Dillinger left the building. It will appeal to anyone who thinks that theatrical food for thought is always best dispensed with a good, swift kick to the head.
This must-see show is narrated by one Macedonio Guerra, a middle-rank, always-the-bad-guy wrestler who understands that his clout comes from his ability to make the hero wrestlers look good. Macedonio (aka The Mace), played with great emotional honesty by Desmin Borges, shrewdly notes that, in the simulated sport of wrestling, kicking somebody in the head always requires the close cooperation of the dude being kicked. In fact, it is far harder to be the kickee than the kicker.
Those who control wrestling know this. They may seem to put all their energies into creating action-hero characters like Diaz’s fictional Chad Deity (played with guileless guts by Kamal Angelo Bolden), but those easy-to-find guys are just ring dressing. The crux lies with the villains, who may seem to lose but actually control the winner. And the populace at large. A similarly sophisticated understanding of the nuances of human behavior surely informs the executive offices at, say, the Fox News Channel.
But here’s the thing: This isn’t a liberal polemic. These wrestlers are smart cookies and practical men. You sense Diaz’s admiration for the sport, and his understanding of how we all compromise to please our bosses. He pokes fun at wrestling’s history of reliance on ethnic stereotypes, sure, but he also makes the point that wrestlers know they’re playing with fiction — unlike the humorless, pointy-headed intellectuals who run the world but still don’t get our need for someone or something to hate, if only to help us understand what we love. That’s a lesson of human nature the current Obama administration perhaps needs to learn.
The play spins on the moment when Mace (whom Borges makes smart and lovable) finds Vigneshwar Paduar (the dry and droll Usman Ally), an Indian kid in the Bronx who speaks numerous languages and, metaphorically, represents the new globalism that’s so threatening to the old order. Can THE Wrestling, as the owning conglomerate is named, turn V.P. into a detestable Islamic terrorist, a sleeper-cell with a Kabbalah-kick? Or has the world become too complex?
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