Kristoffer Diaz is going to the mat for art

It takes an unabashed pop-culture geek to explain his concept of storytelling by invoking professional wrestling, “The Wire” and a youth spent glued to “Yo! MTV Raps.” But for playwright Kristoffer Diaz, those influences have been as instrumental in shaping his voice as the plays and musicals that ignited his interest in theater.

Whether his characters are the exaggerated stereotypes of the wrestling ring, hungry club-scene upstarts or a drug-binging necrophiliac brandishing a severed zombie penis, the aggressive rhythms of hip-hop power his language. And for Diaz, the gritty mosaic of the defunct HBO series has correlations in the multi-strand saga of World Wrestling Entertainment.

“What I see wrestling doing is masterfully telling 10 or 12 stories at any time,” said Diaz over cheeseburgers. “Any one event that’s happening is impacting all these other stories. That’s the thing ‘The Wire’ did so remarkably. You’re following the story of one guy, but everything he does triggers a million other things.”

That layering of narrative is evident in Diaz’s breakout play, “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity,” which bounced from its Chicago premiere last fall to off-Broadway, landing ecstatic reviews and a spot on the Pulitzer shortlist. The play is a flamboyant satire on the ways in which America digests its racial stereotypes, viewed through the prism of pro wrestling’s extravagantly self-styled personalities.

The same dense texture is there in more embryonic form in his earlier play, “Welcome to Arroyo’s,” which opens Sept. 25 at San Diego’s Old Globe. The production is part of the Southeastern San Diego Residency Project, aimed at cultivating voices that can reach a younger, more diverse audience. “When I read ‘Chad Deity,’ I thought Kris was fiercely political, and uncompromisingly so, but he had a heart and was not cynical,” said Lou Spisto, executive producer at the Old Globe. “He’s very strong, very masculine in his writing, but he also understands at the end of the day that he has to reach an audience.”

Spisto said that though “Chad Deity” first sparked his interest in Diaz, “Arroyo’s” was a better fit for the program, allowing the playwright to do further developmental tinkering based on what he had learned from the play’s Chicago debut in April. It moves after the Globe to a secondary run at Lincoln High School for the Performing Arts.

Written seven years before “Chad Deity,” while Diaz was completing an MFA at New York University’s Department of Dramatic Writing, “Arroyo’s” reflects where he was at that time and what was happening to Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

The play tracks Alejandro Arroyo’s efforts to turn the club built out of his deceased mother’s bodega into a Loisaida hot spot; his angry sister Amalia’s need to be recognized as an artist, choosing the walls of the local police station as her graffiti canvas; and a scholar’s quest to reconnect with her roots via a Puerto Rican woman she believes was the progenitor of hip-hop, who may have been Alejandro and Amalia’s mother.

“My family was from the city, but I grew up in the suburbs in Yonkers and Westchester,” said Diaz. “I was a suburban kid who loved hip-hop, and then I went to NYU and came back to that part of the city right as it was starting to gentrify again. It raised a bunch of questions for me about authority. Was I part of the Lower East Side or part of the people coming in and changing it?”

“The big thing I learned writing ‘Welcome to Arroyo’s’ is that I could use plays to work out stuff I didn’t understand about myself,” he added. Though Diaz, 33, strongly identifies as a Latino man of Puerto Rican descent, he acknowledges that labels can be tricky. “I wouldn’t call myself a Puerto Rican playwright because I’ve been to Puerto Rico four times in my life,” he explained. “I’m not even Nuyorican in the way that Nuyoricans are. I’m suburban. Third generation.”

Questions of identity fuel Diaz’s plays, but perhaps more than content it’s the brash theatricality and kinetic energy of the writing that has turned heads. He wants to shake audiences out of their complacency, pushing for the physical charge of a music or sports event rather than the more passive responses engendered by most theater.

Diaz’s stage directions crank up a hyper-realistic atmosphere even before his plays begin, transporting the audience out of the theater and into his world. Blinding industrial lights and a deafening pre-show soundtrack prepare the terrain for “Chad Deity”; the onstage duo who function as the chorus in “Arroyo’s” are already scratching and spinning from their DJ booth as the audience enters.

“From the moment people walk into the space to the time they leave, we have a unique relationship with them,” Diaz said. “In theater circles we talk so much about new audiences, and I think a lot of it has to do with the way we as playwrights and directors tell our stories.”

Along with the music, film, television, video games and graphic novels that feed Diaz’s storytelling, there are also, of course, theatrical influences.

Among plays that awakened his ideas about fluid, filmic theatricality punctuated by meaty monologues, he cites “Six Degrees of Separation,” “Angels in America,” “M. Butterfly” and “Zoot Suit.” He describes seeing John Leguizamo’s solo piece, “Spic-o-Rama,” in his late teens as transformative. Musicals were another prime motivator, with the 1992 Gershwin anthology “Crazy for You” on top of the list.

The breadth of influences contributing to Diaz’s work, in addition to his theater grounding, has made Jordan Roth, president of New York’s Jujamcyn Theaters, a vocal fan, prompting talk of a potential Broadway life for “Chad Deity.” “He’s looking across our culture for inspiration and vocabulary,” said Roth. “That kind of expansive perspective, coupled with an understanding of how to tell a compelling story, is exactly what’s so exciting about Kris, and I think what makes his work so visceral and dynamic.”

“Kris is a language-meister,” added Carole Rothman, artistic director of Second Stage, where “Chad Deity” had its New York premiere. “He can manipulate language in a way that most writers don’t because he hears a rhythm in his head, and the rhythm is often a hip-hop rhythm.”

The first full-length play Diaz completed since his sudden success, “… Vigwan,” was given a staged reading in New York in August as part of Atlantic Theater Company’s Latino Mixfest.

Drolly described by its narrator as “a serious play about serious topics,” this is not your standard office comedy about interpersonal relationships. It’s an absurdist cartoon whose water-cooler chat revolves around remorseless homicide, brutal sex and, yes, that well-endowed zombie. The play was partly an exercise Diaz set himself to write quickly and without self-editing based on commercial constraints, completing the first draft in just two weeks.

“It was very freeing, and there are things I want to be able to learn from that,” he said. “Everything doesn’t have to be life or death. ‘Arroyo’s’ and ‘Chad Deity’ were life-or-death plays for me, and they hurt. They still hurt.”

Diaz is working on a farce and on a Center Theatre Group commission called “I Am the Revolution,” about a woman who accidentally triggers an uprising. In both cases, he acknowledged, despite his intention to write the kind of three-character, single-setting plays that cash-strapped theater companies these days tend to favor, the results have mushroomed into something far more complex and economically challenging.

“I have a really hard time focusing small,” he confessed. “I feel like if I keep trying to compress myself, I’m forcing it.”

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