Playwright brings a devilish comic touch to `Satan'
When playwright Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa talks about his play "Say You Love Satan," the title comes out like this: "Sayoolosay."
It's how he talks -- in a blur. And it seems he lives that way, too.
Aguirre-Sacasa, 30, has had a cluster of high-profile premieres in New York and around the country since he graduated last year from the Yale Drama School. "Say You Love Satan" won an Excellence in Playwriting Award from the 2003 International Fringe Festival and was nominated for a Media Award from the group Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation; it opens tonight at Zeitgeist Stage Company.
But Aguirre-Sacasa has another life: He writes adventures of the Fantastic Four for Marvel Comics; he did the comic-book adaptation of the "Spider-Man 2" film; and he is working on a cartoon series for Nickelodeon with singer Jewel. He does all these day jobs from a desk provided by Second Stage Theatre in New York, where he's playwright in residence.
The fact that a new writer is getting such recognition is unusual, and even more so when you consider how un-mainstream his work is. Many of Aguirre-Sacasa's plays tread enthusiastically in the muck of crime, thrillers, the supernatural, and horror, blending genres in a pop-culture Cuisinart.
"I gravitate toward movies, plays, and novels where regular people are caught up in nonregular circumstances," he says, "like `The Spanish Prisoner,' where they have to adapt quickly."
His plays include: "The Muckle Man," a thriller about a family's grief over a son's drowning; "The Mystery Plays," two connected one-act works about a train wreck in the Northeast and a crime in Oregon; and "Dark Matters," a family drama about a missing wife who returns, possibly having been abducted by aliens.
In "Say You Love Satan," a Johns Hopkins graduate student meets a handsome, charismatic stranger who (he discovers when they start dating) has a 666 on his forehead. Who is this guy? The devil's son? Or something worse?
Aguirre-Sacasa describes "Satan" as both a relationship comedy and an occult comedy. "It nods to the movies I grew up with, `The Exorcist,' `Rosemary's Baby,' and `The Omen,' " he adds. The play was written five years ago, and while Aguirre-Sacasa says he has a lot of "ex-plays" (ones he's "broken up with"), this isn't one of them.
"The humor strikes me as totally irreverent," he says. "It's joke after joke, even as things get really serious. There's a lot of me" in it.
The play stood out, says Zeitgeist's artistic director, David Miller, "because it was laugh-out-loud funny, which rarely happens to me when I'm just reading a script. It has a great comic pop sensibility, but also has a heart. Despite the seemingly extreme conditions of the affair, even Satan . . . learns something about relationships."
Born in Washington, D.C., to Nicaraguan parents, Aguirre-Sacasa wrote early and often: plays, short stories, novels. Comics provided an outlet. Saturdays, he says, were spent going to the local
But seeing a "bloody, sexy, and supremely alive" production of "Macbeth" at the Folger Theatre when he was in high school pushed plays to the forefront.
After studying English literature and studio art at Georgetown University, he took a playwriting workshop with Paula Vogel, whose "How I Learned to Drive" was being done at Arena Stage. With her encouragement, he got into the graduate program at the Yale School of Drama, where his plays started gaining notice.
"Roberto's writing was quirky and vivid when we worked together several years ago at Arena," Vogel says in an e-mail. And after seeing his work at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center last year, she continues, she was "mesmerized by the range, the humor with a very sharp edge to its blade, the astonishing growth."
Aguirre-Sacasa says there's a growing theatrical market for thrillers. "These kinds of plays are successful [because] they have strong narrative plot hooks," he says. "Things are always happening: people get shot, there's a mystery to be solved, a crime to be investigated."
On the other hand, his thick folder of rejection slips tells him how resistant theaters can be to darker material. "People always tell me it would be great if they didn't have a supernatural monster or if everyone didn't die in the end."
"Say You Love Satan" is different.
"Everyone doesn't die at the end of this one," he says. "Some people do, though. It's actually one of my more hopeful plays."
"Say You Love Satan" will be presented by Zeitgeist Stage Company tonight through Sept. 11 at the Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont St. Aguirre-Sacasa will attend tomorrow night's performance and participate in an audience talk-back. Tickets: 617-426-2787, or on-line through theatermania.com.
Local boys make good
Boston's most prominent young playwright, Ronan Noone, is having a play produced in New York. His "The Lepers of Baile Baste," done here by Sugan Theatre Company in 2002, will have its first Big Apple run from Sept. 9 to Oct. 3 at the Phil Bosakowski Theater, 354 W. 45th St. Meanwhile, Boston actor/playwright John Kuntz's "Jasper Lake" opens Sunday at the International Fringe Festival and runs through Aug. 29 at the Schaeberle Studio Theatre at Pace University, 41 Park Row.
Other stages
A Korean-American man in rural Wyoming has his heart set on a beautiful Korean-American woman -- but she dates only white guys. Being billed as a spinoff of "Cyrano de Bergerac," LA playwright Michael Golamco's romantic comedy "Cowboy versus Samurai" gets a staged reading from the fledgling Boston Asian American Theatre Collaborative: tonight only at the Actors Workshop at 327 Summer St., Studio 4, at 7:30 p.m. 617-480-2442. . . . Shakespeare & Company will do a workshop production of "Othello" Sept. 3-5, which will alternate Jonathan Epstein and Tony Molina in the roles of Othello and Iago. Molina replaces John Thompson, who had to drop out because of a scheduling conflict. Tina Packer will direct. . . . Spiro Veloudos, producing artistic director of the Lyric Stage Company, will direct Shakespeare Now!'s production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" next spring. The production will tour schools. . . . The Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theatre was recently named Best of Boston Theater by Boston magazine. . . . Mime master Marcel Marceau will bring his beloved character Bip, as well as his company of young proteges, to the American Repertory Theatre Sept. 10-Oct. 9 in a new program, "Les Contes Fantastiques (Fantastic Tales)."
