Kilroys List honoree Roger Q. Mason (Lavender Men with Skylight Theatre/Playwrights’ Arena) will present a reading of their play Hide and Hide with the Los Angeles Performance Practice as part of their 2023 Live Arts Exchange Festival on Friday, October 20 at 8pm. The play, directed by Jessica Hanna (Priscilla, Queen of the Desert with Celebration Theatre; Hungry Ghost at Skylight Theatre) will be presented at the L.A. Dance Project (2245 E Washington Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90021). Tickets ($14-$29) may be purchased in advance at https://performancepractice.la/portfolio/roger-q-mason/. The performance will run approximately 90 minutes, with no intermission.

Along the Golden Coast of California, two souls collide while chasing freedom. Set in the last days of disco, Billy, a queer rent-boy, is on-the-run from the Texas police; Constanza, a Filipina immigrant, has a visa that’s about to expire. Together they enter a sham marriage to achieve their own American Dream. Full of sex, harm, and violence, Hide and Hide takes audiences on a Homeric Odyssey that disrupts and rebuilds The American Fantasy.

“Hide and Hide tributes my mother and the American dreams she held when she came to the United States from the Philippines in 1980,” said playwright Roger Q. Mason. “How did reality hold up to the promise the States exported to her and others like her abroad? And how does the pursuit of that dream change people as they grasp to attain it?”

The cast will feature August Gray Gall (The Inheritance with Geffen Playhouse; David, My Goliath at REDCAT) as Billy and Amielynn Abellera (King Charles III at Pasadena Playhouse; Walking To Buchenwald with Open Fist Theatre) as Constanza with Movement Dramaturgy by Jay Carlon (fold, unfold, refold at REDCAT NOW Festival; Out of Bounds with Annenberg Community Beach House). This project was originally developed by Page 73 and Breaking the Binary Theatre Festival.

Interview with Playwright Roger Q. Mason

At what age did you decide you wanted to get involved in theatre?

I’ve been performing since I could speak.  My grandmother was an early childhood educator and social worker in Los Angeles.  At age 2, she started teaching me the now-lost art of elocution.  Every week, I’d stand before our family’s yellow Formica table and recite poems from the Black American canon before my grandmother and her two sisters, three grand ladies from the South born in the early 1890s – 1900s.  Performing for them, I fell in love with the power that language has over human emotion.  My journey to theatre started there.

What motivates you to write?

I write freedom songs.  My plays elevate the experiences of folx who dare to think big, love fully and dream out loud.

Nowadays, people consume and create content through TV, film, radio, video games, and social media. Why do you think theatre is still alive?

Theatre is alive because the bond between audiences and performers sharing a fleeting moment, live, in person, cannot be replicated by any other medium.

What opportunities do minorities have to tell their stories in the Los Angeles theatre scene?

First of all, we are people of the global majority.  There’s nothing minor about folx of color.  That’s a phrase that my work and I are doing their damndest to rewrite and revise.  I’ve found that Los Angeles is a vibrant theatre scene with opportunities for new play development and reimagination of classic texts.  The key is how you focus your energies on building relationships with people who see you and your work.  As a POC playwright, I’ve always felt that my stories are valued, shared and reflected back to me from the theatre scene in our city.

Tell us about your experience growing up in the USA as a Black, Filipinx, and queer artist, and how that experience has shaped your storytelling vision.

As a Blasian queer person in our country, I never fit into any boxes, and my differences made people uncomfortable and fearful of the definitions they upheld to keep societal myths alive.  My very existence is an expression of identity beyond various binaries and a testament to the lies of prejudice and bias.  I disrupt the status quo just by existing.  Holding and honing that power – the power to turn disruption into questioning and questioning into transformation – stands at the center of my storytelling vision as a playwright in the American Theatre.

Why did you decide to create Hide and Hide?

I wrote Hide and Hide to celebrate my mother’s journey to the United States from the Philippines.  The play is set in 1980, the same year she came.  It concerns the struggles of a young woman who wants to belong to America but realizes that the version of the States sold to her was a lie.  That disillusionment with the American Dream is a tale that has wafted through my own household, and countless others immigrant homes across the country.  The play’s aim is to hold a mirror onto the lofty values we export abroad and the cost that people pay when they actually try to pursue them here.

What are the main challenges to make theatre in Los Angeles?

Happily, I am seeing strides to change our main challenge in Los Angeles theatre: to build stronger connections between our intimate theatres and larger institutions.  Such programs as the Geffen Writers Room and CTG’s company residency programs (to name two of many) are opening the doors of our larger non-profit theatres to companies and projects who can benefit from time and space with institutional support.  We just have to keep seeing ourselves as one community with a singular aim: to celebrate the richness of La Ciudad de La Reina de Los Ángeles.