This year we will be meeting with other Artists and Cultural Workers to better understand their definition of Radical Imagination and their application to the art they create and the worlds they imagine. Here is a link to the featured artists and thinkers:
Roger. Q Mason
In this first installation of the Radical Imaginators Profiles, we are joined by playwright Roger Q. Mason. We get together to discuss the ways in which Radical Imagination shows up in their work. We continue the interview by diving deeper in the liberatory potential of theater and, what Mason calls, historical revisionism as an impetus for dramatic writing.
Roger Q. Mason (they/them) is an award-winning writer, performer, and thought leader whose work uses history as a lens to challenge systems of exclusion and uplift marginalized voices.
Named "one of the most significant playwrights of the decade" by The Brooklyn Rail, Mason creates bold, genre-defying blending the poetic and the political with unapologetic power. Their theatrical work has been seen on Broadway at Circle in the Square (Circle Reading Series) and The 24 Hour Plays; Off- and Off-Off-Broadway at New Group, New York Theatre Workshop, The Flea, Dixon Place, P73, Breaking the Binary, and National Queer Theatre; and at regional and national venues including Philadelphia Theatre Company, Carnegie Hall, Center Theatre Group, McCarter Theatre, Victory Gardens, and Skylight Theatre Company.
Roger’s plays are theatrical mythologies for the marginalized, especially those who are Black, Filipinx, TGNC, plus-sized, and previously erased from the classical canon. They walk in the legacy of Suzan-Lori Parks, George C. Wolfe, and Taylor Mac, blending historical excavation with avant-garde theatrical form.
Mason holds degrees from Princeton University, Middlebury College, and Northwestern University. They received the Playwrights' Center McKnight National Playwright Commission, the inaugural Dramatists Guild Foundation Catalyst Grant Award, 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.
As an educator, Roger 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. Instagram: @rogerq.mason
