Kristoffer Diaz Wins New York Times Outstanding Playwright Award

Kristoffer Diaz has won the New York Times Outstanding Playwright Award, which recognizes an American playwright whose work recently received its professional debut in New York, for his play The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity. The award will presented to Diaz on July 12 at the TimesCenter.

The play centers on a middle rank pro-wrestler who may have discovered his ticket to the big time: a charismatic, trash-talking Indian kid from Brooklyn whom he recruits as the perfect foil to the All-American champion, Chad Deity.

The work had its New York premiere at Second Stage Theatre last year; the play was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in drama and won a 2011 Obie Award for Best New American Play.

“The committee was impressed by the sheer poetry of the language and the play’s vibrant blend of richly specific contemporary characters with archetypes drawn from West African myth,” said Sylviane Gold, chair of the award selection committee and a frequent contributor to The New York Times.

In addition to Gold, the members of the selection committee were playwrights Edward Albee, Richard Greenberg, James Lapine, and Lynn Nottage, along with the TImes cultural news editor Sam Sifton, theater editor Scott Heller, and Arts & Leisure theater editor Andrea Stevens.