Q&A with Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa

His interesting career begins by day as the writer of the monthly adventures of Spiderman and the Fantastic Four for Marvel Comics and then by night, he is a playwright. Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa is the author of such plays as The Muckle Man, The Mystery Plays, Rough Magic, and The Velvet Sky.  His comedies Golden Age and Say You Love Satan were both nominated for GLAAD Media Awards. Now, Aguirre-Sacasa decided to use his own life as a basis for his newest production, Based on a Totally True Story.

The Manhattan Theatre Club world premiere production of Aguirre-Sacasa's Based on a Totally True Story opened on Tuesday, April 11^th at New York City Center Stage II and runs through Sunday, May 28^th. The production stars Carson Elrod, Erik Heger, Kristine Nielsen, Pedro Pascal, and Michael Tucker. Recently, during performances, I sat down with Aguirre-Sacasa to speak about the play, his day job, and his background.

Nick Orlando: Roberto, it's nice to speak with you. What inspired you to write this play, Based on a Totally True Story?

Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa: Essentially, after I finished grad school and moved to New York/>/>, I had spent a year not writing any plays. I was working on comic books, busy turning one of my plays into a screenplay, [and] busy trying to get acclimated to New York/>/>. I had a couple of productions in place, but I had not written a new play. When I finally sat down to write, I wanted to tell a more personal story that meant a lot to me, so I started writing a play about a playwright who hadn't written a play for a while. Then, I started writing why this character hadn't written a play in a while.

Nick Orlando: Why did you decide to use your own life as a basis for this play?

Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa: A lot of the plays that I have written before had very little to do with my life. They were more genre pieces, one was sort of a ghost story, one was sort of a horror play, and another was a domestic drama. They all had bits and pieces of my personality and my background in them, but none of them grappled with the issues that I found myself grappling with. So, I wanted to kind of draw on something a little more autobiographical. I feel like every writer has one autobiographical play, sometimes more than one. So, I thought rather then try to hide it too much, I will grab it and face it head on.

Nick Orlando: Roberto, this play is getting a lot of attention from celebrities. Is there a certain level of validation when celebrities attend?

Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa: I never even thought about that actually. I am certainly happy when they attend, but I don't think about it that much. I don't feel the play gets validated when a celebrity attends.

Nick Orlando: Did you do anything special during the casting process?

Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa: We worked very, very hard on the cast. The director, Michael Bush, and I wanted to get the absolutely perfect people for the part. Kristine Nielson who plays the Hollywood/> producer and Michael Tucker, who plays the main characters dad (Ian's dad), both did a reading of this play about a year ago and they were wonderful. They immediately signed on. We didn't audition for those parts; we just asked them to be a part of it. That allowed us to really focus on the three young men roles in this. Carson Elrod came in very early on and completely nailed it and we realized we wouldn't need to look much further for an Ethan because he was so spot on. Pedro Pascal, who plays Michael, had just done a show at MTC and when he came in for the audition, he sort of knocked our socks off, I think because we were expecting a certain thing and something else happened.  It was really terrific.

Nick Orlando: How did you begin your career in the industry?

Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa: I studied playwriting at the Yale School of Drama and I would say maybe in my second year there, I had a reading of a play at The Public, that really jump started my career. But, before that, I had smaller productions in smaller theatres, so I had a little bit of a track record. Going to the Drama/> School/>/> at Yale helped solidify my reputation a little bit.

Nick Orlando: Tell me about your beginnings at Marvel.

Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa: About two or three months before I finished at Yale, I started talking to Marvel. Marvel was making a concerted effort to recruit writers from other disciplines, like novelists, screenwriters, short story writers, or playwrights who seem to have an affinity for comic books. They were trying to bring those writers into the comic book field to kind of imbue some new blood into Marvel and a lot of my plays either mention comic book characters or sometimes are loosely based on comic book characters or definitely have a sci-fi, kind of more action meant to them. A couple of people at Marvel read my comic books and asked if I would be interested in working there. I have always loved comic books. When it came time to figure out how I was going to help support myself as a playwright and this opportunity came up, I sort of immediately dove into it. I started pitching on a lot of different series. The first one that landed and stuck was the Fantastic Four, which I have been writing ever since, even though I am about to give it up because I am now writing Spiderman.

Nick Orlando: What challenges do you face on a daily basis at Marvel Comics?

Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa: The biggest challenge that I face is that when playwrights write a play, or at least when I write, I would write a play and then kind of push through to the end and when I got to the end, I immediately took a vacation from writing. I wouldn't write for three or four weeks, sort of rejoin society. I would read, get a good nights sleep, I'd watch television, but that doesn't quite work when you're working on a comic book because it's a rolling deadline, every month there is a new comic book to write. So, after finishing an issue, there is no time to decompress, you immediately dive into the next one. It's more a deadline. The challenges of writing on a deadline are the biggest challenges that I face on a day-to-day basis.

Nick Orlando: What kind of role did comics play in your life while growing up?

Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa: When I was really young, I used to read them all of the time and then I kind of fell out of reading comic books for a while when in high school. When I went to Georgetown/> University/>/> in Washington/> D.C./>/>, there was a comic book shop very close to the university, where actually I got a part-time job, worked there for a while and got back into comics in a big way. Growing up, my brother, sister and I all used to read comic books and my mom would take us to the 7-11 where you can buy them off those racks (which don't exist anymore). I used to devour them, write and draw my own in my sketch book.

Nick Orlando: Which was your favorite?

Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa: I used to read a lot of horror comics growing up. I also used to read the Archie comic books, Batman and Superman. I always read Spiderman. It was a fairly broad base of which comics I liked. There were few I disliked and to tell you the truth, I can't remember one I didn't like.

Nick Orlando: What do you find the most challenging, writing plays or witing comics and why?

Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa: They both have very different challenges. I will say that I feel like when I am working on a play, it's such a personal expression of who I am. The characters are mine, the story is mine. I'm not writing for an artist, I am writing for myself. I am not writing for an editor. My truest, truest passion is for playwriting. When I'm working on a play, that's when I feel most of my creative juices flowing. That's not to, at all, downplay the comic book writing. I am very invested in those characters as well, but I definitely know that these are other people's characters that I am working on. They are not my characters. If I want a character in one of my plays to die, they die. I could never decide that for Spiderman.

Nick Orlando: Roberto, what's in the works?

Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa: So far, we have Based on a Totally True Story that is running at MTC till the 28^th of May. This Monday, [April 24^th], MTC did a reading of my new play, Good Boys and True, which is a more serious play. It's about a high school student who plays football who is accused of something. His mother has to figure out whether or not he actually participated in this scandal, and if he did, why he did it. This fall, Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre in New York/>/> is doing a production of my play, Dark Matters, which is a play about a marriage (a husband, wife and son). The wife vanishes for a couple of weeks and when she comes back, she starts telling stories about these very strange, other worldly creates, that may or may not be extraterritorial. The father isn't sure whether or not he should believe her. This is more of a thriller.

Tickets can be reserved by calling CityTix at (212) 581-1212. The performance schedule is Tuesday through Sunday at 7:30pm/> with matinees on Wednesday (5/17 and 5/24 only), Saturday and Sunday at 2:30pm/>. For more information please visit www.ManhattanTheatreClub.com.