Queer Works In Progress: "Bill" by Roger Q. Mason

Playwright Sponsor: Linda and David Glickstein Fund of the Philadelphia Foundation

Tickets: Pay What You Want & $10

One stage. One microphone. One playwright sharing pages of a new play in development.

Following the artist sharing, PlayPenn Foundry Member, Rayne joins Roger Q. Mason for a conversation on America, liberation, and otherness, asking what it means to be whole in a country still negotiating the boundaries of belonging.

Join us for an exciting evening of new work as 2026 PlayPenn Conference Playwright Roger Q. Mason shares excerpts from their newest play about democracy and the founding of America told through a queer perspective of love, desire, exclusion, and forgiveness.

PlayPenn is thrilled to welcome Roger Q. Mason (they/them) back to Philadelphia to develop their newest work, Bill, after a sold-out run of three new plays known collectively as Califas Trilogy, exploring land, power and dreams in California. Roger previously workshopped their stunning Barrymore Award–winning play, The Duat, at PlayPenn, which then premiered in a production at Philadelphia Theatre Company directed by Co-Artistic Director Taibi Magar.

In celebration of the United States’ Semiquincentennial or 250th anniversary celebration, PlayPenn will host the first public presentations of Bill in July 2026 in both Philadelphia and New York, offering audiences an encounter with this groundbreaking new work.

About Bill

Democracy is dead, to begin with.

And Taffeta, a Black, queer femme of impossible brilliance, refuses to be this country’s janitor once again. Instead, she appoints herself freedom’s only mourner, digging its grave.

As she honors a system that feasted on her people’s rights, three crusty yet resplendent Founding Muthafuckaz (Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, and Thomas Paine) drag their ghostly essences onto the scene and try to enlist Taffeta to build them a new nation for free, brick by brick. But a stranger forces Taffeta to confront whether the country she’s inherited is worth fighting for, or whether it deserves to be rebuilt at all, forcing her to choose a louder, riskier dream built on our rage, our care, and our refusal to succumb to the status quo in silence.

Bill, a sequel to Miss Mason’s Lavender Men, excavates Constitutional history and asks who was intentionally excluded from the founding vision of “We, the People.”