Kristoffer Diaz is the winner of the 2011 New York Times Outstanding Playwright Award for “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity,” his satire of professional wrestling and the ethnic stereotypes and political imagery of that industry, The Times has announced. The award, created in 2009, recognizes an American playwright whose work recently received its professional debut in New York; “Chad Deity” was produced Off Broadway in 2010 by Second Stage Theater, drawing mostly positive reviews. (The play was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in drama that year.) Previous recipients of the Times playwright award, which comes with a cash prize of $5,000, were Tarell Alvin McCraney for “The Brothers Size” and Dan LeFranc for “Sixty Miles to Silver Lake.”
The selection committee included the Pulitzer-winning playwrights James Lapine and Lynn Nottage; the playwright Richard Greenberg, who has been nominated twice for a Pulitzer; as well as Times writers and editors. The committee chairwoman, Sylviane Gold, said in the statement announcing the award, “The play appropriates both the comedy and cruelty of professional wrestling in order to explore the complex dance America does with its minorities.” She added, “We were floored by its swaggering language, vivid theatricality and sheer energy.”
An earlier version of this post misidentified Richard Greenberg as a winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
A report on Wednesday in the “Arts, Briefly” column, about the winner of the 2011 New York Times Outstanding Playwright Award, Kristoffer Diaz, erroneously attributed a distinction to the playwright Richard Greenberg, a member of the selection committee. While Mr. Greenberg has been nominated twice for a Pulitzer Prize, he has not won one.