 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-Sacasa.She told him to "get serious" about writing plays and so he started 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.