Roger Q. Mason's NIGHT CITIES To Receive Reading With National Queer Theater
The reading will take place on Monday, July 14 at 8pm at The Cherry Grove Community House & Theater in Fire Island.
By: Chloe Rabinowitz Jun. 20, 2025
Roger Q. Mason will receive a staged reading of their play Night Cites as part of the Cherry Picked new play reading series with National Queer Theater on Monday, July 14 at 6pm at The Cherry Grove Community House & Theater in Fire Island.
A young Bayard Rustin-before Civil Rights Movement fame-must choose between his private desires as a queer Black man and his public calling as an agent of social justice and civic change. Set against the vibrant labor movement of the 1930s and 40s, this piece embraces the musicality, dream imagery, and liberation of jazz playwriting to explore one man's quest for complex humanity in a world that limits who we are to how we can be used for the good of others.
The reading will be directed by Karl Hawkins (boy meets boy meets girl at A.R.T./New York) and feature J Harrison Ghee (Tony Award winner for Some Like It Hot), Kalonjee Gallimore (A Beautiful Noise on Broadway), Ashton Muñiz (The Inheritance on Broadway) and Kamal Sehrawy (What in the Actual F__k? at NYTW) with Stage Directions by Geoff Hill. Admission is FREE with RSVP, www.nationalqueertheater.org/cherrypicked.
(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, National Queer Theater's New Visions Fellowship with the Dramatists Guild of America 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
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