Acclaimed Black Filipinx playwright and Kilroys List honoree Roger Q. Mason will receive an industry reading of Night Cities, a new play about Queer civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, as part of the Not a Moment, But a Movement Festival presented by Center Theatre Group In collaboration with The Fire This Time Festival and Watts Village Theater Company. The reading, directed by Nancy Keystone, will take place on Sunday, June 23 at 7pm at the Kirk Douglas Theatre (9820 Washington Blvd, Culver City, CA 90232) in Los Angeles. Tickets ($15) are available for advance purchase at www.centertheatregroup.org.
Below is an interview with Roger Q. Mason.
Are you approaching Night Cities from a fictionalized or documentary perspective?
This is a work of poetic expressionism extracted from fact, but aimed at getting to a deeper emotional truth about young Bayard Rustin’s struggles with personal desire versus public duty.
The Cold War was raging during Bayard Rustin’s life. How do you think that affected his activist vision?
In the 1930s, the Communist Party supported Civil Rights work, particularly centering on labor reform. World War II found a shift in interest within the Party, less focus on activism and resistance within the US, particularly military desegregation – a focus of Bayard’s in the 1940s. He left the Communist Party around 1941. Our dramaturg, Dylan Southard, opined in rehearsal that, “The Cold War and the fear of Communists provided another obstacle for Rustin because his dissidents could always tie him to Communism, even if he had dropped it years ago. Much of the fear around homosexuality was tied to Communism and the idea that Communists could blackmail people like Rustin, threatening to out them.”
Rustin traveled to India to learn about Ghandi’s non-violent resistance. Do you think Rustin’s pacific activism in America achieved the same impact as Ghandi’s in India?
It is difficult to directly compare Ghandi’s tear down of the British Empire in India with Rustin’s various efforts to provide labor reform, civil rights, and later desegregation (and its legal ramifications) in the United States. However, in the play, we allude to the notion that Gandhi’s vision of nonviolent protest provided strong reinforcements to Rustin’s pacifist ideals – he was certainly a possibility model for him. Later on, he became a master strategist of logistical and social coordination for protests. I think his experiences in the theatre, and the coordination that producing a show entails, had a significant impact on his work in the movement. Those rallies were indeed a show!
He also traveled to Africa, where he met with leaders of the independent movement. What lessons do think he learned during those travels?
In the play, we feature a quote from his time in Africa, wherein he praises the cultural and robust civic infrastructure that various African countries possessed. This information was suppressed to favor the superiority of the white West. I am sure this information fortified Rustin, particularly later when organizing Black America around finding the bounty they are due in America.
How important was jazz music for a young Rusting living in America?
Rustin was a devotee of gospel and spiritual music. There are recordings of him performing such genres. In the 1930s, he was hanging out at Cafe Society in downtown New York and living in Harlem in the early 1940s, so jazz was an inevitable part of his life.
For your research, did you talk to surviving people that were part of Rustin’s life?
When building a new play, I reserve conversations with surviving persons for later in the process so that my own narrative impulses are articulated first before they are influenced and amended by survivors’ lived experiences. However, those points of view are essential, and I look forward to talking with folks in the next iteration of the piece.
Rustin was arrested for having sex with other men. How do you think that incident shaped or reinforced his activism?
Rustin was arrested quite a few times for sex with men, and it is something that marked his visibility within the Civil Rights Movement for the remainder of his career. It is easy to draw a line between Rustin’s queerness and his activism, but the facts are a bit more complicated than that. It is this tension between private life and public duty that inspired my play.
Being gay and a civil rights activist was dangerous back then. Is it still dangerous today?
It is just as dangerous, if not more, because certain leaders have emboldened our dissidents to feel that they are above the law and beyond reproach.
What is the most important legacy of Rustin’s work that has inspired your own work?
Rustin presents the complex, multivalent, intersectional civil rights leader that we need as a guiding light now.
How did you get involved with Not a Moment, but a Movement Festival?
My champion, hero and constant friend Cezar Williams collaborated with Los Angeles theatre legends Tyrone Davis and Bruce Lemon to bring me into the Festival – and the rest is history.
What can people take away from Night Cities?
We all need to embrace the complexity and contradictions of our desires. How do we balance who we are for others with our private selves? And how do we live honestly and fully along the way. That’s the only way we’ll truly be free.
