Writer Succeeds Against All Odds : Judi Ann Mason, whose new play opens Friday in Hollywood, never let being black or a woman hold her back

Women seem to be having problems getting recognition in the television industry. Black women seem to be having an even tougher time. Don’t count playwright Judi Ann Mason among them. She’s had more than 50 plays produced and has written for television shows such as “I’ll Fly Away,” “Beverly Hills 90210,” and soaps “Guiding Light” and “A Different World.”

How’d she do that?

“I forgot that I was a woman and that I was black. The persona became writer. It was just a determination that was there from the beginning.”

Mason, whose career began at 17, was the youngest playwright to have an off-Broadway production--”Livin’ Fat,” staged by New York’s Negro Ensemble Company. Right now, she’s smiling over the production of her “Indigo Blues,” which opens Friday at Hollywood’s American New Theatre.

The play, directed by American New Theatre’s artistic director, Michele Martin, concerns two middle-aged sisters and the man who loved one of them but stayed with the other, for all the wrong reasons, until he realized his mistake years later. Mason likes to write strong roles for women, but has learned not to shortchange her male characters.

“When I was 17,” Mason says, “I wrote plays that dealt with young people. Then I got into this feminist thing I went through, where there were strong female characters. Later on, male actors said to me so many times, ‘Why are you so brutal to us? Why do you leave us out of this?’ I made a concentrated effort to create a balance in the work, which made me a better writer.”

Mason says she began to be able to examine what she calls “the male part of myself.” She actually assigned female characteristics to her male characters, just as Laurence Olivier explored the female side of his nature to become a better actor, he once said. Mason found the men she wrote about “were fuller; they were just more beautiful men. They had feelings. In my younger years, I thought that men didn’t feel, didn’t think like women thought. When I started giving these male characters female characteristics, I loved them, and I found audiences and actors tended to love them.

“I found a greater appreciation for people, and that’s what writing does; it really opens you up, mentally and spiritually too. You’re not as judgmental as you were when you were growing up, getting those certain mores that you were supposed to live by.”

It was a big lesson in life--and career.

“I had to start seeing myself as a man in many ways in order to function in this business, in Hollywood, particularly.”

Mason, who was raised in Louisiana, says: “I couldn’t be a Southern belle and do the things I wanted to do. You adapt to this sort of macho ‘I can deal with it’ kind of thing. I think that’s when human beings begin to communicate. Just do that exchange. “

Now working on a screenplay for Walt Disney Productions, Mason still spends a couple of months of the year in the South. It’s the world she likes to write about.

Her director, who has worked with Mason a number of times in the past, finds that world fascinating.

“What’s beautiful about Judi’s writing,” Martin says, “it’s about the spirit of love. Also, for me, it speaks about mistakes and flaws in human characters that can perhaps destroy a lifetime, and the courage and inner strength it takes to get beyond those mistakes. And everybody makes mistakes.

“The play’s idea that there are no limitations to love is very meaningful to me. There are no physical limitations to pure love, true love, generosity of spirit, and that’s really in the writing. No matter how flawed a human being can be, we’re all after that.”

The sisters in turmoil are played by Elayn Taylor, who was in the Treat Williams film “Till Death Us Do Part” and has often been seen oA. stages, and Tanya Boyd, remembered from the successful run of “No Place to Be Somebody” at the Matrix Theatre a few years ago and from a couple of productions at Mark Taper Forum’s Taper Too. The man between them is Robert Gossett, seen locally in “Fences” at the Doolittle and in Negro Ensemble Company’s “A Soldier’s Play” during the Olympic Arts Festival.

Gossett was drawn to “Indigo Blues” by its “exploring of love that never dies, which is a line in the play, love that continues over the span of a lifetime.”

“It’s only when something catastrophic happens,” says Taylor, explaining what the play has brought home to her, “that you begin to look inside and wonder what you’ve done to your life. Because we only get one.”

Boyd, who plays the younger sister afraid of losing her youth, loves the flow of Mason’s writing. “It’s such a joy to find good work nowadays,” she says. “My character is a challenge because there are so many different colors to her. I have to think about things with this role that I had tucked safely away inside myself.”

Martin agrees about the writing. “The characters are multidimensional,” she says. “It’s wonderful to flush out that kind of depth and variety, what makes them tick, drives them forward. The clues are always there.”

Those clues are at Mason’s fingertips after a lifetime of examining the “spiritual nature” of people who were very close to her.

“It was necessary,” Mason adds, “to examine why people become who they become, and why they believe what they tend to believe about things of a spiritual nature--things that are born of the spirit specifically. Religion is an offshoot of what a person happens to believe about love, about hate. I wanted to examine love, and why people love, and if love has a nature beyond what we, as human beings, could say was truly love. That’s what ‘Indigo’ is about.”

Mason writes about the South, but has taken a long while to accept being a “regional” writer.

“I guess I could give myself that label,” she says with a laugh, “but because these women are born and bred in a particular area, it gives them a particular color that I really like to explore, that I’d like the rest of the world to know about Southerners. So many times we’re stereotyped.”

Though Mason spends time back home, she doesn’t want to live there again. “I don’t love it that much,” she says, still chuckling. “I’m not living down there! It’s better to look back and reflect on it. That’s why I write about it, because I’m still examining what that place is all about.”

“Indigo Blues,” American New Theatre, 1540 N. Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood, 8 p.m. Fridays to Sundays through June 14. Tickets, $15. Reservations, (213) 960-1604.