Meet Aurin Squire

Aurin Squire is an award-winning playwright, journalist, and multimedia artist. Squire wrote the book for the Tony-nominated Broadway musical A Wonderful World that opened at Studio 54 in October 2024. He won the Helen Merrill Prize for Emerging Playwrights as well as Seattle Public Theatre’s Emerald Prize for new American plays. He graduated from The Juilliard School after a two-year fellowship in the Lila Acheson American Playwriting Program. Squire has had fellowships at The Dramatists Guild of America, National Black Theatre, Royal Court Theatre, and Brooklyn Arts Exchange. After graduating from Northwestern University, he worked as a reporter for publications like ESPN, The Miami Herald, The Chicago Tribune, The New Republic, Talking Points Memo, and Take Part. His dark comedy To Whom It May Concern won New York LGBT theatre awards for best play, best playwright, and best actor before being optioned and remounted off-Broadway to critical acclaim at the Arclight Theatre. As a documentary writer, Squire received a year-long commission to live in New Mexico, interviewing Jewish Latinos. He has been a guest artist and lecturer at Northwestern University, Penn State U (Altoona), Gettysburg College, NYU, Molloy College, and New School University. His plays have been produced in London, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, and other cities in the US and abroad. Squire has worked as a tv writer on This is Us and BrainDead and was the co-executive producer/writer on the legal drama The Good Fight and the supernatural thriller Evil. He lives in New York City.

Interview with the Playwright

CATF:  Why is your play so potent and appropriate for the time we live in? 

AS: The time we live in and the state of the country now was set 20 or 30 years ago when I was in school. In the 90s, politics shifted to being 24/7, 365 days non-stop with the news cycle, social media began to blend with media, perspectives siloed off into social media buckets where you didn’t have to have outside perspectives, politics and the media were weaponized as well as calling people who disagreed with you evil and unpatriotic. Several crossroads brought us here, and the 90s is one of the main crossroads in my life with the OJ trial, Monica Lewinsky, Anita Hill, and the 2000 election. In all these crossroads we chose the path of fear and limitations and anger and tribalism and arrived here in 2026. If we are going to undo or transform it, we have to go back to the roots of some of these things I grew up with.

Explain the title, “My Favorite Sociopath”…

The system is a sociopath. Media is a sociopath. The concept of sociopath, in the age we live in, is less a psychological diagnosis of a patient and more a psychological virus that is transmittable through our media and our interactions, and it can infect people. Once they have that virus, it can lay dormant for many years like shingles, and then under the right circumstances – the right pressure or the wrong pressure – that latent virus can flare up. Sociopathy, certain levels of misogyny or xenophobia seem to rise and fall. Rather than following it only when it rises, if we consider it a virus that infects a significant amount of the population due to our media, it just lies dormant, waiting for the right situation to trigger it. All it takes to unlock it is the right series of combinations from a politician or the media. By the end, it is the system and then it is the audience with their smartphones and cell phones feeding that virus and making sure that it sticks around. Our job as artists is to possibly vaccinate rather than just to wait until it bubbles up again with a George Floyd or an election.

How do the religious affiliations of the characters enhance your narrative?

I went to Northwestern in the 90s during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. During that scandal, I was amazed at the amount of people who used religion to catapult their own internal struggles into something external. The sexual frenzy, sexual fear and witch hunting were related to a religious discomfort and fear about other things.

In your October 22, 2024 Theatre Podcast with Alan Seales, you said, “I needed money, so you needed to make your articles captivating.” Is that moral?

Absolutely. How much do you withhold truth if you know that it will cause people to revolt and rebel? One of my favorite classes was literary journalism – using literary structure and fictional techniques to tell a greater truth; a truth that cannot be accessed just by laying out the facts. You have to use those techniques to break through people’s barriers.

Based on an exchange between two characters in your play: would you act immorally to get power so that you can be moral in the future?

It depends on the context. I have a certain belief system which is Buddhism. My blog is called “Six Perfections”: giving, morality, patience, effort, concentration and wisdom. What makes it a perfection is that the list goes up and down. Each one of those points includes all the others. Wisdom is the ultimate nature of how things work. Knowing the nature of how things ultimately work, I probably would not do that because anything that comes out of immorality will come back later and will be much bigger. 

Trump being in office during the time of COVID led to the death of 1.2 million Americans. Would I do something immoral to one person to save 1.2 million? I would definitely consider it. I would have to wrestle and be clear that I am not doing this against Trump, I’m doing this for the greater good. In Buddhist teaching, that person is not outside of me. That person I’m correcting is me. I wouldn’t want to do the harshest thing because that person is me. Trump’s harm is a mirror of things I have done in the past therefore I must correct it. I must correct the wrong I’ve done in the past that is now wrong again.

Comment on this line from your play, “People want to eat their own shock.”

This is someone from the 1990s being sensationalistic; someone who will react to something that makes them angry more than to something that makes them smile. A well-established algorithm posits that if you make people feel shocked or angry, it goes around the world farther than if you make people feel hope. The race is hopefully a marathon and not a sprint and hope can win out in the long run. But out of the gates, fear and shock zoom ahead of hope. We have to realize that some people want to consume fear and rage, then serve it to others.

You were asked once about what advice you would give to your younger self or people starting down a similar path. You responded: “Focus more on your voice and less on other people’s trajectory.”  How would you describe your voice?

My voice leans toward dark comedy and irony – finding the hypocrisy, finding the contradiction and then working toward the contradiction in me. I don’t write until I think of a provocative question that challenges and makes me uncomfortable, that makes me think about the world slightly differently. There is a sort of Soviet art technique called defamiliarizing – where you take something in art and you deconstruct it to the point where you don’t recognize it, so when you look at it again, you have a new awareness of it.  When you look at a dog again after you’ve seen a Picasso painting of a dog that is deconstructed, you look at your dog and have a greater awareness of the assumptions you had of a dog. I would like to think that as I am writing art, it defamiliarizes the subject and then comes back at the end. Hopefully the audience is like me. They look at a sociopath with a different lens or more understanding and awareness.

You wrote the book for a musical about Louis Armstrong called, “A Wonderful World.” You said you admired how Armstrong followed his joy. How do you follow your joy?

By finding things that make me laugh, things that make me think, things that make my mind race or trigger memories. That’s the point of art and that’s what makes me passionate.

Mel Brooks: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”

Tragedy for a lot of people is the little minutia of life – like Chekhovian tragedy, the ennui of little inconveniences that pile up to great dissatisfaction versus a pie in the face – one big distraction – which is hilarious.

How do you balance following established theatrical practices with pushing and/or breaking theatrical boundaries?

I went to grad school at the Actor’s Studio New School, and all of our principles are based on making things that are actable. Everyone has to act, the writers, the directors as well as the actors so we know how it feels to stand on stage and do and say things. We all did Sanford Meisner improv and Meisner graphs. We had to stand up and make sure it’s character-first motivation. The categories of Meisner improv and character analysis are their must-do – not their want because people want a lot of things. What must I do at this next moment?  What must I do to get to the end of this day? The actions are multiple things one must do, emotions are multiple things throughout the trajectory of the actions, the previous circumstances before the story began, the obstacles that are preventing me from getting my must do. Why do I care if you don’t achieve the must-do or do? What do I need from you that you aren’t willing to give or what do you need from me that I’m not willing to give? 

This was the foundation of my understanding of drama, and from that I’ve taken each one of those concepts and riffed off on things I respond to with previous circumstances. So when I’m writing something I ask how can I make this a little bit different while sticking to the character base of my training. The way I’ve done that is I let the characters speak and guide me and if they feel propelled to say something or stop a scene and have a moment that breaks, I let them do that and it becomes a new style. It might not survive the revision edit, but it might and become part of my style or the style of the play. Any change that is worthwhile and sticks is character motivated and either shows the internal monologue of the character or shows the internal dreams or nightmares of that character externalized.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.