A creative triple-threat—filmmaker, playwright, and actor—Aurora Real de Asua is a Basque-American artist who grew up in Northern California along the shores the Pacific Ocean. So it’s no surprise that her hilarious and poignant new play Wipeout takes place off the Pacific beach of Santa Cruz. Though this play marks Real de Asua’s professional debut as a playwright, she has been writing and performing in her own work since childhood. “Writing and acting was always how I understood the world,” she says, pointing to the novels she started daily as an elementary school student, and to an earlier formative experience for her individualistic imagination. “When I was about five years old, I was obsessed with Cinderella, the Disney movie. And I was obsessed with the mice in particular. I loved them so much. I wanted to be them. To my five-year-old brain that translated into, ‘Great. I love mice. I want to be a mouse.’ So for my fifth birthday, we had a box of costumes and basically did Cinderella on loop for an hour and a half. I would only play Gus—the chubby mouse with a little hat. I played him and wouldn’t let anyone else touch him.” And though her artistic impulses have matured since then, the characters in her work still retain the free-spirited enthusiasm of childhood. “The best of my work comes from parts of me that are far wiser than my head,” she remarks.
Real de Asua studied playwriting and acting at Northwestern University and after graduating, spent a couple of years in Chicago working as an actor, appearing in The Wolves (Goodman Theatre), The Wickhams (Northlight Theatre), The Adventures of Augie March (Court Theatre), Top Girls (Remy Bumppo Theatre Company), Pipeline (Victory Gardens), and The Firebirds Take the Field (Rivendell Theatre Ensemble), in addition to her work with Chicago Shakespeare Theater and Metropolis Performing Arts Center. “I loved it,” she reflects, “but it wasn't satisfying enough. I wanted to do more. I wanted to be involved with every part of the story. And so I started taking playwriting seriously, professionally.”
Wipeout is set offshore in the Pacific Ocean and tells the story of three lifelong friends as they confront their mortality while learning to surf. A surfer herself, Real de Asua learned how to surf with her mother when she was just ten years old. “[Wipeout] is inspired by my profound love of the ocean,” she’s written. Wipeout is also inspired by the summers she spent in Spain with her eighty-year-old grandmother and her friends whom Asua describes as “wild and totally out of control; women who taught me that we become stronger versions of ourselves as we get older.” Her insight on the strength and wisdom women can gain as they age stands in contrast to the wider narrative tendency to see aging as a time of invisibility and retreat for women. The play received its world premiere through National New Play Network’s Rolling World Premiere over the 2023-2024 season. The Rolling World Premiere Program mounts at least three different developmental productions of a new play throughout the country at different venues, giving Real de Asua a safety net to take artistic risks and an opportunity to experiment. Wipeout had its premieres at B Street Theatre in Sacramento, CA; Rivendell Theatre Ensemble in Chicago; and The Gloucester Stage Company in Gloucester, MA. “The very, very first draft of Wipeout I wrote was for a college class. And it was awful. I remember the feeling of mounting pressure. So I got to a cafe one Saturday morning and I sat down and I opened up a new page and I put Wipeout as the title. I got to the second page and I just stopped—and these voices came into my head. And I just started writing.”
And though this is her first produced play, Real de Asua’s body of work is populated by quirky, fierce, and deeply hilarious women who break with stereotypes of how women at many ages are expected to behave. Her play WET is set in a prestigious all-girl school and “follows three generations of women as they navigate the tumultuous waters of friendship and the complexities of attraction.” The Hairs In Between Frida Kahlo's Eyebrows “is the story of the last day of the life of Frida Kahlo...told from the perspective of the seven hairs growing in between her eyebrows.” Real de Asua’s plays give bold and eccentric women a center-stage to be their authentic selves. Her most recent piece, titled The Pride, features actors who play both engineers at a cutting-edge Silicon Valley startup nearing their billion-dollar valuation, as well as lions who live next to homo sapiens who are about to discover fire. “It’s an exploration about how we change when we’re in power and why empires fall—why are they unsustainable, in which ways, and what does that mean for us today.”
For Real de Asua, the practice of writing a play involves both the practicality of discipline and staying open to creative impulses. “For me, writing has always been a blend of doing very hard work, being very aware, listening very hard, engaging to the world around me, but also every now and then it's like some ethereal stork passes by and just drops these creative babies into my lap. And I have to imagine that happens for other creatives, this sense that whatever we tap into when we meditate or play or when we’re with friends, that it’s there as well.”
—Gursimrat Kaur