American Theater Company

American Theater Company. By Kristoffer Diaz. Dir. Jaime Castañeda. With Joe Minoso, Christina Nieves, Sadieh Rifai.

CHORAL OF THE STORY GQ, left, and Jackson Doran spin a tale.

Photo: Chris Plevin

Sometimes you can believe the hype. Diaz, 32, fresh from a Pulitzer nomination for The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, returns with a hip-hop–flavored look at the Lower East Side. Arroyo’s echoes Deity’s metatheatrical high jinks and inspired pop-culture riffing but with a richer tonal palette: more Jackie Brown than Pulp Fiction. Centering on newly orphaned siblings Alejandro Arroyo (Minoso), striving obsessively to turn his mother’s bodega into a successful lounge, and little sister Amalia, or Molly (Nieves), a fiery graffiti artist, the play blends streetwise exuberance with deep melancholy undercurrents.

Diaz offers something for the different audiences within each of us. The inner grad student can track the theme of perception: Much hinges on whether an old photograph depicts the late Mrs. Arroyo, while Molly, rookie cop Derek Jeter and nerdy hip-hop researcher Lelly Santiago (an affecting turn by Rifai) all ponder how their names shape others’ views of them. For the less high-minded, there’s goofy interplay between DJs Trip and Nelson: “We’re the chorus,” they helpfully announce.

Arroyo’s has its imperfections. A romantic subplot between Molly and Officer Jeter, for instance, never stops seeming contrived. But Castañeda’s sensitive, often hilarious production gives this deceptively wise play the debut it deserves. Channeling Afrika Bambaataa, Lelly reminds Molly that graffiti forms one of the four pillars of hip-hop (along with deejaying, emceeing and break-dancing). Thanks to Diaz and ATC, it’s not so crazy to imagine theater as the fifth.

• More theater reviews
• More Theater articles

The TripNel Cartel blow up ABC's Weekend Report!

Buy tickets at www.atcweb.org or call 773-409-4125!

Six months ago, Kristoffer Diaz was an obscure young playwright with developmental workshops aplenty on his resume but not a single full production. Then, this past October, his pro wrestling-themed play, "The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity," became the hottest ticket in Chicago, was slated for production at New York's Second Stage (it opens there May 10), and last week was announced as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It's only fitting, perhaps, that at this moment, a theater finally stages the world premiere of the first full-length work he wrote, "Welcome to Arroyo's," a personal, charming, clever play with a hip-hop bent, about a Puerto Rican brother and sister trying to make their way in the world after their mother's death.

To its credit, Chicago's American Theater Company had programmed "Welcome to Arroyo's" prior to the success of "Chad Deity," and this very fine production directed by Jaime Castaneda certainly begs the question of what exactly took so long for someone to produce it.

Yes, it feels like a first play; and no, it's not as unique or surprising or layered as "Chad Deity" (few plays are). But this work demonstrates a genuinely honest voice, an energetic, playful theatricality, and a confident if still maturing grasp of solid storytelling rooted in character. It seems an ideal piece for regional theater second stages, with an ability to appeal to a younger audience without alienating existing subscribers.

"Arroyo's" is set on Manhattan's Lower East Side in 2004, where Alejandro Arroyo (an excellent Joe Minoso) has built a lovingly tended bar in the space where his hard-working mother ran a deli for 20 years. So far, though, customers haven't taken to it, despite Al's determination to treat each customer like royalty.

Meanwhile, his younger sister Amalia (Christina Nieves) -- the artist to her brother's entrepreneur -- spends her days painting her name in graffiti, choosing to do so, with typical brash rebellion, on the wall of a police station.

Brother and sister both get unlikely romantic interests, Amalia with a cop (Edgar Miguel Sanchez) and Alejandro with a kooky young academic (Sadieh Rifai) looking to make a name for herself by tracing the history of a Puerto Rican woman she claims was an important pioneer in the history of hip-hop.

It's clear from his thematic contemplations in "Arroyo's" and "Chad Deity" that Diaz considers hip-hop as a form to be a genuine expression of America itself. He also makes a strong effort here to enliven his traditional narrative by incorporating hip-hop into the story, employing a two-man chorus of DJs (including GQ, one of the creators of "Bomb-itty of Errors" and "Funk it Up About Nothin'?") to serve both as narrators and as friends hanging out with Alejandro at his bar.

It's clever stuff, and although he is prone to youthful excess ("My mind would be blown," says one DJ after a moment of revelation, "if I weren't an omniscient narrator"), overall the two DJs successfully infuse energy throughout and keep the play proper from taking itself too seriously.

Those qualities -- thoughtfulness combined with playfulness, nurtured in "Arroyo's" and fully realized in "Chad Deity" -- have deservedly removed Diaz's obscurity and make him an extremely welcome voice in American theater.

Check out the full article: variety.com

“This play was supposed to be my, like, reckoning of my own relationship to being Latino in New York City, and Latino and a fan of hip-hop,” says Diaz, who grew up mostly in Yonkers but spent time with cousins in the Bronx and his grandmother on the Lower East Side; he discovered theater in high school (“anybody who is the weird, awkward anything in high school stumbles into theater”). “It became this fun relationship play between this brother and sister.”

“What this play is dealing with is this whole new generation of people who are a mixture of racial identities,” says ATC ensemble member and Arroyo’s director Jaime Castañeda. “Kris and I are adamant about this idea of a new kind of theater that speaks to other communities. Chad Deity has all these racial politics cooking underneath it, but it’s different from the older generation of writers who broke through who were closer to that immigrant movement. He’s just a whole new voice. He comes at [everything] from, like, four different angles.”

For Diaz, who has a graduate degree in dramatic writing from NYU and another in performing-arts management from Brooklyn College, engaging a new generation of theater audiences is “the million-dollar question,” he says, noting it’s not as easy as setting up a Facebook page. “We’re trying to figure out ways to develop relationships. It’s not just, We want you to pay your money and come see the show. There’s got to be some back-and-forth.

“We have to drive home the fact that theater’s a conversation in a way that film and television aren’t,” he continues. “I think that’s what young people—eh, who knows what that means, ‘young people’—I think that’s what people who aren’t coming to theater are looking for.”

Read more at http://chicago.timeout.com/articles/theater/84683/kristoffer-diazs-welcome-to...

Once upon a time, “in hip-hop’s earliest days, there was a Boricua— I’m sorry, you might not know what that means — there was a Puerto Rican woman who could rock a microphone in English and Spanish with only herself as her DJ …”

That's how Kristoffer Diaz kicks off his latest play in production like a hip-hop fairy tale, following up on “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity,” his first-ever full-length work to get produced. Chicagoland critics and audiences loved its 2009 run at Victory Gardens Theater, and now New York City is producing it off-Broadway. Simultaneously, Diaz comes home to the very first play he ever wrote, “Welcome to Arroyo’s,” at the American Theatre Company (ATC).

“There was a lot I needed to figure out when I was in college and then graduate school about my place in Latino culture,” says Diaz in a phone conversation from Minneapolis, where he currently resides. “I think ‘Arroyo’s’ is the play that, as I was writing it, really helped me figure all that out.”

Read more at Cafemagazine.com!