Mac Rogers: The playwright in his Bushwick home with dramaturg in tow. Photo by Saundra Yaklin.

Bushwick playwright Mac Rogers has become known as one of the most dynamic and original voices in the New York independent theater scene. But don’t go to one of his shows expecting trenchant, realistic drama or garden-variety indie comedy. Expect aliens. Or robots. Or perhaps Satan herself.

“I don’t get through many adult dramas that don’t have much suspense or humor or aliens,” says Rogers. “I really like things like horror, science fiction, and action-suspense. These things aren’t always easy to express on stage, but I really love popular storytelling forms.”

Rogers, who has been writing and producing theater in New York for a decade, recognizes that understanding his own pop culture predilections is key to writing a successful show. “One of my rules is to write the kind of stuff you enjoy watching. It’s not that I’m not interested in serious themes, I just have to admit that I don’t actually like sitting through something like Long Day’s Journey Into Night, even though I really wish I did. So it’s kind of inexcusable for me to write that if it’s up to me to tell other people what to watch.”

Viral. Click to enlarge.

And his approach works: for the past several years, Rogers has been turning his obsessions into award-winning productions. Rogers’ last show, Universal Robots –- a creative reimagining of R.U.R., the classic science fiction play about a robot uprising –- won the Independent Theater Bloggers Association award for Best Off-Off Broadway Play and recently picked up four nominations at the New York Innovative Theater Awards. His play Hail, Satan, a fusion of The Omen and The Office, won the FringeNYC 2007 Outstanding Playwriting Award. Rogers was also part of the team that wrote and produced Fleet Week: The Musical, a gay-friendly salute to the patriotic musicals of yesteryear, that earned FringeNYC’s Outstanding Musical in 2005.

In addition to calling Bushwick his home, Rogers also collaborates with several companies who are producing theater in Williamsburg and East Williamsburg. “I’ve developed shows with [Vampire Cowboys] Saturday Night Saloon, which is a fun crowd. Another theater company I’ve been working with for years, Nosedive Productions, has started doing their shows at The Brick.” Rogers acknowledges that theater has lagged far behind the other arts in embracing opportunities outside of Manhattan. “There’s been this belief in theater that if your play is in Brooklyn, it’s somehow provincial. But it seems irreversible that Manhattan is just going to keep getting more expensive for theater companies. And [Brooklyn] is increasingly the epicenter where exciting things are happening.”

With his latest work, Viral, Rogers is even pushing his own creative boundaries. Viral is a pitch black comedy about a woman who googles “painless suicide” and finds a group of fetishists who will help her end her life — if she will let them film and sell it. “It’s not easy to write the next play after one people liked a whole lot, particularly when it’s such a departure like this,” notes Rogers. “But you can’t really decide what kind of playwright you turn into. You can only write the play that you’re interested in enough to finish.”

Viral continues through Wednesday, August 26, 2009 as part of the New York International Fringe Festival. For more info on performance dates and tickets, visit viraltheplay.com.