The UCLA School of Theater, Film, & Television has awarded playwright Roger Q. Mason a Los Angeles New Play Project (LANPP) grant to support their play Hide and Hide. LANPP recipients are awarded $20,000, with an additional $20,000 given to producing entities to help mount productions.
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, the latter of which will be developed at the Ojai Playwright Conference Fall Playwright Residency. Los Angeles' Skylight Theatre will present the world premiere of Hide and Hide May 17-June 22, 2025, with Jessica Hanna directing.
“Competition was very high for the LANPP Playwrights Award this year, and our jury spent considerable time discussing Roger’s Hide and Hide,” Paula Holt, Director of the LA New Play Project, said in a statement. “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,” Mason said in a statement. “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 1980s Los Angeles, Hide and Hide follows Constanza, a recent Filipina immigrant from Ferdinand Marcos' Philippines, and Billy, a white Texan rent boy running from a Christian sex conversion camp.
Established in 2021, LANPP helps to support original work presented on the Los Angeles stage. In partnership with playwrights, producers are invited to submit new plays under consideration for production in their upcoming season. Through a distinguished peer panel review process, LANPP identifies and rewards what its jury agrees are the strongest works.
Visit LANPP.org for more information.
