The Heavy LiftingResisting the Obama Presidency's Neoliberalist Conceptions of the American Dream in Kristoffer Diaz's The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity Noe Montez (bio) Macedonio (Mace) Guerra walks into a wrestling arena moments before making his debut as a ringside manger. The grappler is positioned for the first time in his career as not just an invisible journeyman but as a character recognized by the sport's audience. Guerra has assumed the alias Che Chavez Castro, a caricature of the United States' most insidious imaginings of Mexican identity. He is paired with his protégé—an Indian American immigrant portraying a Pakistani villain known as The Fundamentalist. Whereas global wrestling monopoly THE Wrestling and its all-powerful CEO Everett K. Olson once rendered Macedonio a bit player, in this moment, surrounded by a mise-en-scène that fuses communist symbolism, Islamic iconography, and Latin American stereotypes, Mace has become an integral component of THE Wrestling's story line. His character has been written into a plot that will lead The Fundamentalist to battle and defeat world champion and American hero Chad Deity. In playwright Kristoffer Diaz's Pulitzer Prize–nominated script The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, [End Page 305] Guerra's transformation is powerfully depicted, detailing Mace's rise from boyhood aspirations of becoming a professional wrestler to becoming rapidly subsumed by athletic stardom in a rags-to-riches tale driven by narratives of the American dream and neoliberal capitalism. The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity premiered at Chicago's Victory Gardens Theater in September 2009, just a few months after the city's own Barack Obama was sworn in as forty-fourth President of the United States. Shortly after the play's opening, Deity received productions in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Dallas, Washington, DC, and many other cities across the country, peaking as a programming favorite during the Obama presidency. For playwright Kristoffer Diaz and President Obama alike, the narrative of the American dream, its meaning(s), and the strategies for attaining it are central. Obama constructed his 2008 run for the presidency around a message of success through meritocratic opportunity, as exemplified by his own biography as a black man positioned to run for the highest office in the United States: "I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton's Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I've gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world's poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slave-owners—an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible."1 In this campaign speech and other orations delivered on the campaign trail, Obama spoke about the need to reclaim the American dream through policies and legislation that would facilitate an individual's ability to accumulate the capital necessary to achieve financial sustainability and individual happiness regardless of racial/ethnic background or socioeconomic class.2 While Obama uses the American dream narrative to make aspirational claims about American exceptionalism, these pronouncements come at the expense of what Cornell University law professor Aziz Rana refers to as a "broader left imagination" that might redress the fundamental structural problems of institutionalized racism and class disparity that continue to confront the nation in our present moment.3 Contrarily, playwright Kristoffer Diaz draws upon the same myths of American meritocracy but uses his drama to critique the social and cultural conditions that lead the play's characters to imagine themselves within the American dream myth in order to envision an alternative model of personal [End Page 306] fulfillment. In The Elaborate Entrance of Chad...