Roger Q. Mason - glamgical

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.

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.