Kristoffer Diaz is a man on fire. The New York native has been a successful playwright for well over a decade now. His play The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity was a 2010 runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize and won the Obie Award for Best New American Play in 2011.
Diaz spent the next thirteen years working on, among other things, a collaboration with Alicia Keys (yes, that Alicia Keys). That decade-plus of hard work has paid off handsomely with the smash Broadway hit Hell’s Kitchen, which this year garnered 13 Tony Award nominations, including nods for best musical, for Beaverton’s own Shoshana Bean for best featured actress in a musical, and for Diaz himself for best book of a musical.
Now, this nationally renowned playwright is debuting his newest play, Reggie Hoops, in a Profile Theatre production at Imago Theatre in Portland, where it previews on August 1 and 2, opens on August 3, and runs only until August 11, so, if you’re going to catch it, make your plans now.
Kris Diaz made his name writing plays about subject matter that is not typically considered theater material. “The things that I love and am drawn to are things that not a lot of other theater people are drawn to,” he says. He wrote about hip hop in Welcome to Arroyos before Hamilton made it cool to a certain segment of American theater. Chad Deity is about professional wrestling. Reggie Hoops is about the world of professional basketball. “I figured out early on,” he says, “that the stuff that is unique to you is the stuff that is going to stand out on stage.”
Even within the framework of his thematically atypical subject matter, Diaz still manages to aim left of center of where you think he’s going. Arroyos is centered on the owner of a bodega-cum-nightclub, where local rappers struggle to make a name for themselves. Despite its title, The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, isn’t about the Rock or Hulk Hogan of its fictional wrestling federation, but about the professional tomato can, Mace, whose job it is to take an ass-whupping while the stars get more famous and make more money.
With Reggie Hoops, Diaz’s protagonist is a former basketball player with a passion and a gift for team-building and who is good enough to do it at an NBA level, but who, as a Black queer woman, faces numerous obstacles to achieving the life she wants. “The secret to all of it,” says Diaz, “is that a show about professional wrestling is not a show about professional wrestling. It’s about community, feeling unappreciated; it’s about fighting the political system in the entirety of the world.”
If it sounds like Diaz has a thing about underdogs, it’s a charge he readily admits: “When I played sports growing up, I wasn’t very good. But I knew how to work hard and be scrappy. I’ve always had that kind of push for somebody who’s unappreciated, who’s just like, put your head down, do the hard work. I don’t always set out to write that, but it seeps in.”
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Diaz, much like the characters at the center of his plays, is down to earth, clear-eyed and personable. This could be because besides being a playwright he is also a husband, father and educator: He teaches at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and Gallatin School of Individualized Study.
Or it could simply be a thread woven throughout the tapestry of his character, either by instinct or design. That authenticity, that purity of purpose — and the search for it — is the thematic throughline and dramatic fulcrum on which his plays balance. The protagonists in Diaz’s plays want something that they have words for but can’t quite articulate. They can see their goal, but they don’t know how to manifest it in their everyday life. They have a passion, and a vision, but the entire world is between them and achieving it.
Reggie Hoops follows the fortunes of its eponymous central character, a former basketball player and former assistant general manager of a professional team, who finds herself at a crossroads in her professional life. When a complicated former relationship walks through her door with an amazing opportunity, Reggie must decide between what she wants for her career and what she needs for her life. Like all of Diaz’s plays, Hoops‘ multi-faceted (and often hilarious) characters wear their hearts on their sleeves and say what’s on their minds. They’re messy and reckless, but still, for the most part, trying to do the right thing.
Reggie Hoops started out as a commission from Temple University eight years ago. “I was writing specifically for six actors from their graduate acting program,” Diaz says. “I got to sit with them and talk to them about what would they want to do? What kind of characters would they want to play? Who did they want to be on stage?”
Of course, eight years ago the United States was in the crucible of what Diaz and his young cohort assumed would be a historic presidential election. They were right – just not in the way they thought.
“The undercurrent, what we all assumed was happening,” says Diaz, “is that we thought we were witnessing the election of the first woman president. There was something in the air about a woman who was doing the work and showing up every day and was potentially about to change the world in a seismic sort of way. The first reading we did of that play was the night before the election. So, we did that reading. We had a good feeling …” And then, of course, events played out the way they did, and everything changed – even for Reggie Hoops. “I thought,” says Diaz, laughing, ‘I gotta change everything in this play.”
The changes were made, the production at Temple happened, then the play went on the back burner of Diaz’s burgeoning career. “I kept sorta hacking at it, trying to figure out what it was. Then, a couple of years ago, [Profile artistic director] Josh Hecht reached out to me, said, ‘Hey, this is what Profile does. Which plays of yours should we do?’” Diaz figured Profile would want to do Deity and Arroyos, two plays that had had success elsewhere ,and he also suggested a couple of new works that hadn’t yet been produced.
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One of those new scripts was a broad comedy about football “which no one will ever produce because it’s ridiculous,” says Diaz. (He pitched that play to Hecht and, in a turn of events that easily qualifies for Least Shocking News of 2024, Profile’s artistic director wasn’t really drawn to it.)
But another was Reggie Hoops. “[Josh] really connected with this one,” says Diaz. “He has done a great job with saying, ‘We’re going to do this play in a couple of years.’ And then we revisit it over the course of that two years.” For Diaz, the important thing was that Profile was committed to actually producing the show. “To me,” says Diaz, “that makes a huge, huge difference.”
In a lot of ways, Diaz says, Reggie Hoops hasn’t changed that much over the past couple of years. “As much as there was a lot of work to do on this play,” he reflects, “structurally, it’s very similar to how it was in the beginning. Somewhere early in the process I realized it was going to be that American family play. There’s a tradition around that kind of work.”
What’s different about Reggie Hoops, aside from the decidedly 21st century makeup of the family itself (two queer moms of color), is the character arc of Reggie herself.
“A lot of times,” says Diaz, “there’s a character who wants a thing very badly at the beginning of the play, tries to get it, there are a lot of obstacles in their way and then either they get it or they don’t. This play’s not quite that. It’s a play about a character who has made up her mind about a thing she wants, and a lot of other people come to her and try to convince her otherwise.”
The internal mechanisms of those characters, and the dynamics of the interplay of their personalities, are where most of the changes in the script happened. But most of those were made by the time he came here in July and it was more or less time to hand the play off. He is effusive in his praise and his trust in Melissa Crespo, the director of Reggie Hoops; its cast, which is laden with a handful of the most popular actors of the Rose City; and of Profile Theatre.
There was a time, early in Kris Diaz’s career, when he had a specific writing process. He would start writing at 10 or 11 p.m. and write until 3 or 4 in the morning. “It was awful,” laughs Diaz. “I did good work, but it wasn’t sustainable.” Since then, marriage, kids, becoming an educator, life — have dictated that Diaz writes when he has time. “When I talk to my students,” he says, “it’s reframing what writing is. I’m always working on it somehow. The actual sitting down and doing the writing is only one small part.”
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Also, deadlines. “When there’s deadlines,” says Diaz, laughing again, “that’s when the work gets done. I used to feel bad about that, but then I watched an interview with Terence McNally, and they asked him, ‘Do you write every day.’ He said ‘Oh, nonononono. I write when the deadline comes up.’ And I’m like, ‘That works for him it works for me.’”
Somehow, Diaz keeps his feet on the ground. With all the hubbub around Hell’s Kitchen and the Tony Awards, and teaching and writing for television (he’s written for HBO, FX and Netflix, among others), Portland’s relatively slow pace has been a bit of a respite for Diaz. When we talked, he was just about to head back to New York for two weeks. “The break of it all has been that I’m not a dad for this week. I can’t even check in on my kids because of the time difference. But I talked to my wife last night. She’s like, ‘When do you get home on Sunday?’ ‘6-7 o’clock.’ ‘Great. Just in time for you to take over all parenting duties.’ She’s special.”
These are heady times for Kristoffer Diaz. Finalist for a Pulitzer. Tony-nominated. Diaz knows now that when he writes a new play, “Somebody’s going to take a look at it.” Still, he emanates a palpable vibe of gratitude and humility balanced with an awareness and appreciation of his own abilities, as well as that of his collaborators. And one gets the feeling that he’s doing his best to take it all in, to not let the moment slip by.
“Hell’s Kitchen is running. Hopefully, for a very, very, very, very long time. I’m writing a new musical – this one about college basketball and advanced statistical analytics. Again, not musical theater fodder, usually. I’m trying to do some more TV stuff. Trying to find a new life for Chad Deity, on Broadway or some other big, full-on production. There’s a lot going on. It feels like this – this is the window. If I’m going to make it happen, I’ve gotta make it now.”
With all that going on it is a wonder that Diaz remains so grounded. “I think it’s prioritizing,” he says. “My kids and my wife are more important than any of the other stuff. And it’s a good time in the theater world to say that I prioritize my work-life family balance. That’s really important to me. That part of being a functional person that remembers why we’re doing this, really helps. The flip side of that is that I’m addicted to this. I’m addicted to writing. I’m addicted to making stuff.”
When you listen to Diaz talk, you hear his characters. You hear Alejandro from Welcome to Arroyos, Mace from Chad Deity, and you hear Reggie from Reggie Hoops.
You wanna know what makes Kristoffer Diaz tick? Go see his plays.
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“Reggie Hoops”
- Author: Kristoffer Diaz
- Company: Profile Theatre
- Where: Imago Theatre, 17 S.E. Eighth Ave, Portland
- When: Previews Aug. 1-2, opens Aug, 3, continues through Aug 11
- Ticket information: Here
