Too Much White Space
A Prayer by Roger Q. Mason
I’ll never forget this phone call all the days of my life.
Several years ago, my genderqueer coming-of-age play (actually queer performance rite – more on that later) The White Dress was making the script submissions rounds. Like so many writers, I spent several months filling out online demographic forms, fashioning artistic statements, saving and resaving the script with either full contact info or none at all, based upon the application requirements. Then, after the rush of soul searching and introspection that applications season elicits, I set the work aside, forgot all about the applications and took a nap. That’s all we can do once we’ve pressed “send” because our apps could all be “yeses” or all come back busts, and – ultimately – it doesn’t really matter. We will keep working and plying our craft regardless of institutional engagement. I’ve rationalized applications as invitations for literary staffs dialogue with you about your work. Your writing will (or should) keep happening no matter what, but these apps offer digital open houses to the state of your craft at that moment. And, believe me, I’ve had some truly affirming conversations with arts administrators about my work over the years because of these applications – and I’ve met a great deal of champions through cold submissions too.
But, this one conversation really got under my skin. About two months after I’d submitted The White Dress to a development opportunity, I received a call from the head of literary. The reason for this person’s call was to ask me for a verbal guarantee of my play’s length over the phone. After clarifying it was a performance work, not a play, I answered that the piece was 90 minutes, as indicated on the application. This person pressed on, expressing doubt in my assessment of the piece’s length. They revealed that the organization subscribed to a rubric which guaranteed a minimum performance length for staged readings. The literary rep was concerned that my piece did not fit the criteria because there was a lot of “white space” on my pages. After asking for further clarification, they said to me that my use of stage directions was doubtful in its fulfillment of the opportunity’s requirements and the piece was being rejected.
For a few moments, I was shattered. Not because my play was being rejected. No. That is par for the course in our business. Rather, I was hurt by the fact that this literary representative’s assessment of my work used a superficial, one-size-fits-all rubric to judge if my individual, specific piece of work was worthy of further developmental support. In that moment, this individual became a symbolic stand-in for the greater idea of theatre institutional affirmation. Her rejection, based upon how my piece looked (not its content), signaled that my work and I were not worthy of institutional support because we did not fit an established dominant dramaturgical norm. In other words, the work was rejected because it was different.
Now, before I veer too far down that rabbit hole, let me tell you a little bit about The White Dress. This queer performance rite follows Jonathan Howard, a Black and Filipinx protagonist, on their gender expression and sexuality journey from age 8-25. Because the work is concerned with the psychologically and personally damaging effects of gender policing and queer phobia on the POC queer body, it melds character-driven scenes with fourth wall address, spoken stage directions, and movement storytelling to externalize characters’ interior lives.
The “white space” I held on the page for the expression of characters’ interiority was an intentional aesthetic choice, and certainly one that – when performed – would MORE than comply with the minimum performance length requirements of the abovementioned developmental opportunity. For me, the script was a blueprint for a larger multidimensional event meant for performance in three dimensions before an audience. It is, in fact, for these reasons that I labeled it a queer performance rite:
It is queer because it exists outside of the patriarchal, heteronormative, linear, cause-and-effect dramatic structure;
It is performance because its metatheatrical gestures invite the audience to participate in our storytelling processes on stage and give them space to actively engage in the narrative meaning-making;
It is a rite because it exists as a spiritual ritual in which we pray through the performance for a queer future for the Jonathans of the world wherein they will can live unpoliced as their natural born, beautiful selves.
The white space on my pages is mine to fill or not to fill as I see fit.
The Black queer imagination doesn’t make meaning in the same ways as its heteronormative counterpart. It can’t. It has seen and experienced too much. It has been burdened with not only surviving physical, civic, and spiritual abuse, but also imagining - unsupported by dominant culture - its own road to personal and societal freedom. Therefore, the language we queer POC writers use, the shapes and forms our stories take, the ways we develop such tales in the rehearsal room with our collaborators, the types of mentors we seek, and the ways we need readers to receive our work are all different and should be celebrated for that difference.
After that phone call about The White Dress, I stayed sad for only a few moments before I grew galvanized in my new purpose – to keep making work that both agitates for queer POC visibility as well as diversity of narrative form. My hope and prayer is that this work contributes to a new queer canon in which LGBTQIA+, POC, and immigrants are the new protagonists and our stories are take center stage in dominant cultural conversation.
But more importantly, this phone call made me think about the others who’d engaged in similar conversations and others still who would be receiving that call one day soon. Perhaps a call like that would make someone put their pen down or close their laptop to playwriting endeavors forevermore. Then, we would have lost a potentially brilliant voice on the brink of flying. That cannot be the case. To counter balance it, I dedicate myself to mentoring the next generation of Black queer writers building our playwriting future one performance work at a time. Emerging storytellers the likes of Keyon Woods and Julius Powell are forging creative paths for themselves and others coming right behind them as I write. Their work, rich, multi-valent, and deliciously interdisciplinary, invites theatre to cakewalk with music, movement, and visual art and the results are galvanizing.
The future of our profession is bright so long as we make space for difference – on the page and off.
Roger Q. Mason is an award-winning writer, performer and educator known for using history's lens to highlight the biases that separate rather than unite us. Mason's playwriting has been seen on Broadway at Circle in the Square (Circle Reading Series); Off/Off-Off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop, New Group, American Theatre of Actors, Flea Theatre, and Access Theater; and regionally at McCarter Theatre, Victory Gardens, Chicago Dramatists, Steep Theatre, Serenbe Playhouse, EST/LA, Son of Semele, and Skylight Theatre. He/they are the recipient of the Chuck Rowland Pioneer Award, the Hollywood Fringe Festival Encore Producers Award, and a finalist for the Lark Playwright's Week and the Screencraft Play Award. Mason's films have screened at Outshine Film Festival and the Pan African Film Festival. They've been recognized by the AT&T Film Award and Atlanta International Film Festival. He/they hold degrees from Princeton University, Middlebury College, and Northwestern University.