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[0:01] Christine Toy Johnson: Welcome to Season 5 of the Dramatists Guild Presents TALKBACK.

[0:11] Christine Toy Johnson: I'm your host, Christine Toy-Johnson. This season is all about how we can challenge the status quo and not only expand the canon of what plays are taught, read, programmed, and used to define the idea of what classics are, but also to ignite it with new actionable strategies. To me, this is not about canceling the existing canon. It's about being intentional about how we make space for additional, diverse, and inclusive stories as well as reimagining often produced ones so that the American landscape of storytelling is truly reflective of the gorgeous tapestry of people that inhabit it. In this episode, Roger Q. Mason talks about the importance of expanding conversations with producers about our work and our visions for experiencing it. I'm so excited to get to talk with you. Roger, can you please introduce yourself to our listeners?

[1:12] Roger Q. Mason: First of all, it's a great honor to be on this show with you. My name is Roger Q. Mason, and I am a Black and Philippinex writer. I was born in Santa Monica, California. I spend a lot of my time between New York and Los Angeles on this wonderful hustle we call show business. This season is all about igniting the canon and coming up with different strategies to accomplish this. And one of the things that we've been discussing is writing outside your lived experience, which really is an ongoing evergreen topic because it keeps changing as we do and as our understanding of the world around us does. I wanted to talk to you about the fact that writers from historically excluded communities have often, always, often, always been expected to accept white cisgender majority stories as relevant to us and as, quote, unquote, universal.

And I'm interested in talking about how many writers from historically excluded communities are now being told we can write only about our own specific cultural experiences, not about any part of the white cisgender majority world in which we still live. So I'd love to know what your thoughts on this are, if you have experiences around this or anything you want to say.

[2:45] Roger Q. Mason: Oh, I love it. First of all, this question and this topic is making me think about an experience I had in New Mexico almost 10 years ago now. I was on a writer's retreat through the Middlebury College Bread Loaf School of English, and our retreat leader was the great short story writer and poet Simon Ortiz. And we were writing short stories in this retreat, and we had about five or six of them. And I, at that time, was finding myself writing a lot about my familial experience and the myth of this family of mine, my dad, whose parents had moved from Texas to Los Angeles in the 1940s, and my mother, who moved to L.A. in 1980. And all of these stories were about that moment for them when they met, who my dad was before, how that impacted our generation.

And Simon took me aside one day after class and said, I noticed that you're writing a lot of autobiographically based work. And I just want to remind you that the imagination encourages us to write about the worlds we don't know. And I said, that's exactly what I'm doing. I, until now, have felt as though I needed to comport myself on the page in a particular way that allowed me to seem literate, intelligent, and in conversation with a well-behaved version of the canon, but at the sacrifice of my own story. And so what I'm doing now, by thinking about my own mythos and the origins from which I came, is I am writing what I don't know. I'm writing what I have not been allowed to know. I remember early on, I would write in these applications to graduate programming that, for me, my story started from the simple act of oration before my grandmother and two aunts.

I had to memorize, as a child, Langston Hughes's collected poems of Langston Hughes. And every week we would recite a new one, and I would stand before this tribunal of women and present my version of that particular poem for the week. I started doing that when I was two years old. And I think about all of the things that I learned from that moment about storytelling and about who I am and who I could be. That's my origin. That's what brought me into show business, was standing in front of those women and learning elocution. And when I would write my applications from that standpoint, they'd always get rejected. They were not interested in how we, in our homes, in our lived experience, were influenced by those environments to create the work that we do.

And I believe that has changed a lot in the years, in what I call the fight for visibility politics, this sort of moment that we're in now. Our stories and our abilities to preserve those stories hold a certain cultural and aesthetic value and currency now in ways that they didn't when I was first coming up. Now, what they wanted us to be at that time, I've suppressed from my brain because it was such a traumatic experience to be rejected in that way year after year and have to find and define oneself in spite of that. How do you keep going as a writer when you're standing in front of an ocean of no? You have to pull from within. You pull from the stories that you know, and you find something unfamiliar, something strange or something interesting about them.

[6:32] Christine Toy Johnson: That is such an amazing, interesting response. I want to talk more about your view on this, what you said, fight for visibility politics, because I do think that fighting for visibility in this sense really does include fighting for how we see ourselves and how we project our own stories as opposed to expectations from other people.

[7:05] Roger Q. Mason: Right, right. I think what has been a great aid in the fight for civil rights has been the telephone and social media, because in a world where we have social media is that we can say things like we see you white American theater. And by literally saying we see you, we are saying really not only are we seeing you, we're calling attention to the ways in which you are disenfranchising us or portraying limited views and visions of us in your programming. And we're asking for accountability. Now, all of a sudden, people get worried about bad press. They don't want to look bad. They want to be on the right side of history. Some of them, but some others are brazen enough to continue perpetuating these social ills.

But many folks will become shuttered and concerned, and they'll either genuinely change their policies of either programming or how to choose plays. Or they will at least perform the outward trappings of inclusion, but not really invest intrinsically in what it means to care, not only peripherally but truly holistically in the life of an artist. Now, when I think about visibility, I think about the fact that by being out, just look at what has happened in the last 10 to 15 years for queer and trans folks. I never will forget the New York Times article that came out almost 10 years ago about the different genders. I think they had listed at that time over 30 genders that they could name. And just simply by naming the fact that male and female as a standard-bearing, absolute finite system of gender identity was false, not only biologically but also sociologically, historically, culturally false, bringing in other cultures which define gender and gender expression and gender identity differently.

We have forced a country and emboldened a world to understand that the world is not black and white. And now we're dealing with the backlash. Now we have states saying, don't say this word, don't give certain services to this person, because if I acknowledge that they exist through the word, then all of a sudden I have to deal with them. I can hide from them. I can deal with my discomfort by brushing them under the rug and saying, just don't say it in the schools. Suppression of identity and suppression of information as a counterbalance to the power of visibility will not last. Because we, in the various we's that I'm talking about, have always existed, and simply turning a blind eye to us or putting a wool sheet over us for the moment only serves one purpose, which is to make you feel temporarily comfortable in a world that actually is uncomfortable because you allow it to be. And you allow it to be because you live in a reductive and myopic vision of life.

[10:27] Roger Q. Mason: So art now has the opportunity, I think, to encourage our imagination, our civic imagination. This is the essential reason why we need realistic depictions of the diversity. We need diversity in the stories and the types of stories that we tell, because the myths that we tell ourselves are the realities that we enact and embody. Think about what happens when you tell a child a fairy tale as a civic lesson. From that scene of instruction, that child develops a worldview. The simple act of telling and receiving and then repeating a story has a profound effect on the cognitive comprehension system of anybody who encounters that story. Stories are powerful, and who you include in them and what you say in them and what roles you allow those people to play in those stories has a direct impact on the civic, legal, medical, political way in which those people are rendered.

If you show somebody a stereotype of somebody, society will start treating them in that stereotypical way and will create justifications for why it's right. We're still living, Christine, in an age of the aftermath of the Three-Fifths Doctrine. We have still not truly understood people of color as fully human, because if we did, we wouldn't be suppressing their vote. If we did, we wouldn't be having housing disparities. If we understood Black folks as human, we wouldn't be trying to redistrict to figure out what civic amenities we don't have to give them, what kind of clean water we can bypass or just barely give them. These are all aftermaths of a story that we told and then reinforced in law that these individuals are not human, and we have not truly recovered from that story.

One of the stories that we in the American theater need to rewrite is that one. Until we truly embody and celebrate the essential and complete humanity of Black and brown folks, and then by extension, all of the other marginalized communities that we used Black bodies as the civic experiment for how to exploit, we will never be free. Yes, visibility is power, and visibility is essential, and we do see all of the institutions and individuals that run away from telling the truth.

[13:12] Roger Q. Mason: Of the American myth and we will hold them accountable through as many means and for as long as we have to, and we cannot allow little glimpses of progress, little bones thrown at us to feel like they've ended the fight. Freedom is not a destination. It is a road that we have to constantly travel down. We never really get there, but we're always fighting to achieve it. And the minute we rest and the moment we stop is when the other side, whoever that side is or whatever sides come creeping back in and start eroding from within what little progress we've made. You cannot stop. You cannot relent. And so rest is important because you've got to have enough stamina, spiritual stamina for the journey.

[14:04] Christine Toy Johnson: Yes, thank you so much for all of that. I take great comfort in knowing that as storytellers, we have this power to make change through the tales that we tell of our histories. And even as there are many who would like to erase those stories or suppress them or try to bury them, we can still write new ones and emerge from that. So thank you so much.

[14:37] Roger Q. Mason: And we have to write the same ones again because people like to play like they didn't hear you the first time.

[14:45] Christine Toy Johnson: Yeah, I'm also fascinated by this way that some people who don't want to hear the story we've told will just keep saying, no, that story isn't relevant to me or it doesn't resound. So I'm not going to put it on my stages and come up with a story that actually I'm more comfortable with.

[15:07] Christine Toy Johnson: We'll be right back.

[15:16] Christine Toy Johnson: And we're back. You and I have talked a little bit about this, I think you call it this anti-discomfort movement. And I want to ask you about what you think about this, how we can ensure that storytelling doesn't lose that function to provoke thought and inspire action, ask difficult questions. How can we go from the inside out and address this very real problem that's happening now?

[15:47] Roger Q. Mason: We have to encourage people to ask the most dangerous question in the world. Why? Once we start critically thinking, what is the first thing that they started this by trying to discredit critical race theory? And the reason why is because critical race theory encourages deep and interdisciplinary inquiry. It encourages thought. And when you exist in a society that wants people to work nine to four, not nine to five, because they want to keep the one hour off so you're not full time and can't ask for overtime and can't ask for benefits. They want to give you just enough hours so that you feel like you've got a job and then clip off the last one so that they don't have to care for you. If you start having a culture of people that will ask why or rebuff that system or question the fact that you're actually disenfranchising them by doing that, you would no longer be able to keep the mill open.

The mill would be on fire. So you have to keep people complacent by discouraging them from asking why. What legislators have figured out is that you have to stop inquiry at the most impressionable ages, their grandchildren. All of these guys sitting here and yeah, it is these guys sitting there on Capitol Hill are looking at their grandchildren saying they them and watching RuPaul and reading books about integration and they're getting scared because if my grandchild starts asking me if this is wrong, that gets to my conscience. And you see, I've got lobbyists to report to. I've got special interests to maintain. So I think what we need to do is we need from that same tender age to wage our own counterwar.

Let's take these kids and say, go ahead and ask why. Why? Why? Because if you can encourage critical thinking from the formative age where a child starts making meaning in the world and start socializing themselves, you might have a chance at a better future.

[18:03] Christine Toy Johnson: Roger, I'd love to talk to you about how we can harness this energy that you have just expressed about empowering people to be curious, to ask why, to tackle all of the questions that people don't want us to ask. Not only to imbue our stories with that, as we continue to do, but how we talk to theaters around the country about how vital it is that they open their doors to these kinds of stories and the power of storytellers to make change in this way.

[18:53] Roger Q. Mason: Well, first of all, the storyteller themselves has to realize that this is their obligation to the spirits. I think about how the ancients, the ancient Egyptians and the ancient Greeks understood that playwriting was a spiritual act and that the ritual of gathering to hear a story is what made the sun follow the moon and the crops to grow and the rivers to rise and the silt to be fertile. They understood that this incantation known as live performance, the communal wish for balance and for community, for theatron, the seeing place as the Greeks talked about it, was actually a prayer for community and for wholeness. And I'm not saying every writer needs to do this, but I can only speak to what I know.

I reach for the heavens when I write. I'm praying. I'm praying for us in this realm. I'm praying to those who have come before with gratitude that they traversed this journey before and left a path. And I'm praying for the future. And I'm doing it in a way that harnesses language, time, space, characters, costumes, scenography towards a higher spiritual calling. That is what I know my work is. And again, I'm not saying everybody has to do it, but for those that know that to be their calling too, I'm saying, come on, this is the church. Let's make a holy noise onto each other. I'm trying to embolden those that understand the spirit of the ritual of the theater to be a powerful tool of transformation and soul washing.

I'm trying to encourage them to do that. Now, the other thing is when those writers manifest those pieces on the page, they may not be well-made plays. They may not be language and dialogue driven. They may use methods of storytelling that are outside of the normalized dramaturgical lens that theaters use. So we need to be in dialogue. Whenever I get a rejection letter, I ask to receive the notes. You don't get off the hook because you told me no. Let's talk. Because actually, and I tell them this, that helps me understand how to better represent myself in my work. And also, it might help you understand how better to read things that are outside of your comfort zone. How do you not just look at the blueprint as a literary two-dimensional work, but as an invitation for a three-dimensional performance that's going to happen in life before an audience in real time?

How do you, in other words, how do you encourage your readers to comprehend a piece through an imaginative lens? How do you help people learn how to dream? That's what you're really asking. How can we re-invite the American theater to learn how to dream? It's one script, one conversation, one I don't know, but let's talk about this. How do you meet people where they are and say, it isn't for me, but this is where I would send you next. Let's really talk to one another. And in that moment, we all will grow because you may learn that you actually did like my script, but you just didn't have the vocabulary to figure out how you could find your way in it. I don't submit plays to people. I invite them to experience the work as it is.

I don't send script submissions. I send invitations for creative dialogue and we have to embolden our members at the Dramatist Guild to understand that we're not submitting. We are engaging in a conversation and we are blessed and they are blessed. And because we're talking, we all are blessed because we have the chance to grow. When you come from that generative place, you will change the American theater and we've got to do it one email at a time until every single relationship comes from a constructive and growth oriented place. And as long as I'm working and living sane, because I hope this business don't drive me crazy, as long as I have my facilities, Lord help us, I will be holding people accountable and saying, let's talk and let's figure out how and why.

And if it's not you, then maybe somebody else. But we need to be dedicated to developing new plays and new ideas. That's how you actually keep doors open. That's how you actually save an industry. By encouraging the young, not just the age wise young, but young ideas, new ideas, folks later in life saying, I want to try something different. And knowing that they have safe havens in which to do that. Knowing that these institutions and these companies, storefront and not, are places that can hold and handle and care for and encourage artists. They can be home. That's what we need to foster. The answer to our problems in the American theater is to change. I don't care to let me help you. Nonchalance and selfishness and scarcity mentality have no place in my aesthetic ethos. I have no patience for it. There's always enough. Why? Because my imagination is boundless and your ability to understand it is boundless too, if you let it be.

[25:18] Christine Toy Johnson: Thank you so much. That I'm going to wrap us up there because really you have given us so much inspiration and food for thought. Thank you, Roger.

[25:23] Christine Toy Johnson: Thank you to Roger for joining us. This episode was produced by Amy von Masek and me, Christine Toy Johnson. Our music was composed by Andrea Daley, recorded at John Marshall Media in New York City. Special thanks to Outloud Audio in New York City and Hyde Street Studios in San Francisco, California. The Dramatists Guild Presents Talkback is a production of the Dramatists Guild of America and distributed by the Broadway Podcast Network. Let us know what you thought about the episode by using hashtag DGTalkback. As always, to be continued.