Roger Q. Mason Awarded LA New Play Project From UCLA

Acclaimed Black Filipinx playwright and Kilroys List honoree Roger Q. Mason has been awarded the Los Angeles New Play Project from the UCLA School of Theater, Film, & Television for their play Hide and Hide.

Hide and Hide is the second play in Mason's new trilogy about the past, present and future of California as expressed through western expansion and gentrification. The trilogy also includes California Story and Juana Maria. Juana Maria, the final piece of the trilogy, will be part of the Ojai Playwright Conference Fall Playwright Residency where Mason will develop the piece with LA partner theaters, Outside In Theatre and Skylight Theatre. Skylight Theatre will present the World Premiere of Hide and Hide, directed by Jessica Hanna, May 17-June 22, 2025.

"Competition was very high for the LANPP Playwrights Award this year, and our jury spent considerable time discussing Roger's Hide and Hide," said Paula Holt, Director of the LA New Play Project. "It is a challenging play, skillfully written and relevant to this strangely hopeful, strangely dystopian time that we live in. As a funder, we are trying to nourish the kind of writing that meets the current challenges of complexity, of social dysfunction, of dissonance. Hide and Hide hits all those marks, and manages to create characters that an audience might want to spend time with. It's local to California, but relevant to the immigrant experience all over the globe."

"Paula Holt is a futurist," said playwright Roger Q. Mason. "She possesses the ofttimes rare gift of seeing a play for what it will in a few drafts and deciding to invest in its potential now. Brave, visionary champions like Paula are the bedrock of my writing career."

Set in seedy 1980 Los Angeles, Hide and Hide is a Homeric critique of the American Dream. Enter Constanza - a recent Filipina immigrant from Marcos' Philippines - and Billy - a white Texan rent boy running from a Christian sex conversion camp. Their lives collide while searching for the freedom only real on movie screens, billboards, and our minds.

Roger Q. Mason (Playwright) (they/them) is an award-winning writer, performer and educator who satirizes and revises history to disrupt the biases that separate rather than unite us. Their playwriting has appeared on Broadway; Off/Off-Off-Broadway; and regionally. Their recent productions have garnered five Barrymore Award nominations in Philadelphia, a Jeff Award Recommendation in Chicago and the San Francisco Chronicle's prestigious Datebook Pick. Mason's World Premiere of Lavender Men was lauded by the Los Angeles Times as "evoking the mingled visions of Suzan-Lori Parks, Jeremy O. Harris and Michael R. Jackson." They received 2024's Playwrights' Center McKnight National Playwright Commission, the inaugural Dramatists Guild Foundation Catalyst Grant Award, a Hermitage Residency, a Lucille Lortel commission, a Kilroys List nod, and the Chuck Rowland Pioneer Award. Mason is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America, and an alum of the Ma-Yi's Writing Lab, Page 73's Interstate 73 Writers Group, the Fire This Time Festival, and Primary Stages Writing Cohort. They currently produce a memoir/cooking segment on Instagram called Cooking with Q: A Playwright's Guide to Telling My Truth. Previously, they co-hosted the podcast Sister Roger's Gayborhood and hosted This Way Out Radio's Queerly Yours: Portraits in Courage. As an educator, Mason has served as a mentor for Lambda Literary, Workshop Theatre, the Marsha P. Johnson Institute's Starship Fellowship, the New Visions Fellowship and the Shay Foundation Fellowship. They are currently on faculty at CalArts. Mason holds degrees from Princeton University, Middlebury College, and Northwestern University. Instagram: @rogerq.mason