Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (born 1973) is an American playwright, screenwriter and comic-book writer known to a wide audience for his work for Marvel Comics and for the HBO drama series Big Love.
Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa was born in Washington, D.C., the son of a prominent Nicaraguan diplomat, and raised in both the United States and Nicaragua. He received his undergraduate degree at Georgetown University, where he studied playwriting under Donn B. Murphy, received a Masters Degree in English literature from McGill University, and graduated from the Yale School of Drama in 2003.
Although he wrote some plays in high school, it was after college, while working as a publicist at the Shakespeare Theatre, that he had an opportunity to attend a week-long playwriting workshop under Paula Vogel during her 1998-99 residency at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. Vogel had invited area theaters to send their "resident playwrights" and company director Michael Kahn sent Aguirre-Secasa. She told him to "get serious" about writing plays and so he starting applying to graduate programs in playwriting.
Early plays during his first year at Yale include Say You Love Satan, "a romantic comedy spoof of the Omen movies", and The Muckle Man, "a serious family drama with supernatural overtones"; good reviews on summer productions of those helped him get a professional agent.Rough Magic, an interpretation of Shakespeare's The Tempest where Caliban escapes from Prospero's island and finds himself in present-day New York, was produced at Yale during his last year there.
Other plays produced in 2003 were The Mystery Plays in New York, which had won a writing award the previous year from the Kennedy Center, and a hit production of Say You Love Satan at the 2003 New York International Fringe Festival.
He grew up liking comic books. "My mom would take us out to the 7-Eleven on River Road during the summer, and we would get Slurpees and buy comics off the spinning rack. I would read them all over and over again, and draw my own pictures and stuff." He began writing for Marvel Comics, he explained, when "Marvel hired an editor to find new writers, and they hired her from a theatrical agency. So she started calling theaters and asking if they knew any playwrights who might be good for comic books. A couple of different theaters said she should look at me. So she called me, I sent her a couple of my plays and she said "Great, would you like to pitch on a couple of comic books in the works?"
His first couple of submissions were "not what [they were] interested in for the character[s]" but eventually he was signed for the Fantastic Four, with the first issues published early in 2004. The 11-page Fantastic Four story "The True Meaning of..." was in the Marvel Holiday Special 2004. He went on to write Fantastic Four stories in Marvel Knights 4, a spinoff of that superhero team's long-running title; and stories for Nightcrawler vol. 3; The Sensational Spider-Man vol. 2; and Dead of Night featuring Man-Thing.
Playwriting continued along with comic writing, with several productions of new and old works. In 2006, his semi-autobiographical Based On A Totally True Story (about a comic-book writer/playwright struggling with new-found success and boyfriend problems) was staged at the prestigious Manhattan Theatre Club in New York. When asked by The Advocate, "Which came first, being a comic-book geek or being gay?" he answered, "I would say I was probably a comic-book geek before I knew anything about being gay or straight. I certainly loved superheroes before I knew I was gay..." He also noted the play was, "thankfully", not about his current boyfriend.
In May 2008 Aguirre-Sacasa returned to the Fantastic Four with a miniseries tie-in to the company-wide "Secret Invasion" storyline concerning a years-long infiltration of Earth by the shape-shifting alien race, the Skrulls. and an Angel Revelations miniseries with artists Barry Kitson and Adam Polina, respectively. He adapted for comics the Stephen King novel The Stand.
In summer 2009, the Round House Theatre in Bethesda, Maryland, premiered his play The Picture of Dorian Gray, based on the novel by Oscar Wilde. That same year, Aguirre-Sacasa and artist Tonci Zonjic finished Marvel Comics' Marvel Divas miniseries, and he began working as a writer for the HBO series Big Love, a position he continued in 2010 during the show's fourth season. In February 2010, he was announced to write the book for the musical adaption of the novel American Psycho.
South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California, presented the premiere of his play Doctor Cerberus in spring 2010. He also revised Robert Benton's musical It's a Bird...It's a Plane...It's Superman for the Dallas Theater Center production in Dallas, Texas, in June 2010.
The New York Times reported on 16 February 2011 that Aguirre-Sacasa was approached by the producers of the troubled Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark to work on the its script; a few day later, the show's director and co-writer, Julie Taymor, dismissed this saying, "I've never even heard of him." But by the time of Taymor's departure as director on March 9, Aguirre-Sacasa was onboard as script doctor.
In May 2011, Aguirre-Sacasa was hired as a co-producer and writer of Glee.
While at Yale, he received the Eugene O’Neill Scholarship and the ASCAP Cole Porter Award. In 2002, The Mystery Plays received the Roger L. Stevens Award from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays. Say You Love Satan received an Excellence in Playwriting Award "and was a runaway hit" at the 2003 International Fringe Festival in New York City. He received a GLAAD Media Award nomination for The Mystery Plays in 2003 another for Say You Love Satan in 2006 and the Harvey Award (Best New Talent) for his work on Marvel Knights 4.
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