Writing Theatre as Time Travel

Class Description

Instructor: Roger Q. Mason Semester: Fall 2026 (Tuesdays) Session: 10 Online Sessions New Students: $600 Returning PlayPenn or DGI Students: $525 Foundry & Entrepreneur Members: $480 DGI Certificate Students: $480 Playwright Roger Q. Mason invites writers to treat history as theatrical material: something we can remix, question, mythologize, reimagine, and transform. Working with historical events, family histories, forgotten figures, archival fragments, and stories that have been excluded from the official record, writers will experiment with nonlinear time, anachronism, counterfactual history, ghosts, ritual, imagined encounters, and future perspectives. How might a historical figure speak to someone living today? What can an invented scene revel that an archive cannot? Through generative exercises and discussion, students will develop their own “Impossible Archive”: a collection of historical, theatrical, and future-facing fragments that can become the foundation for a new play. No prior experience writing historical drama is required. WEEK 1: The Artifact & The Question WEEK 2: Writing Into the Gaps WEEK 3: Coloring Outside the (Time)Lines WEEK 4: The Remix (Anachronism & Sound) WEEK 5: Theater as Ritual WEEK 6: Playing with "What If?" WEEK 7: Impossible Encounters WEEK 8: The Future Looks Back WEEK 9: Building the Blueprint WEEK 10: The Living Archive Showcase ROGER Q. MASON is an award-winning writer, performer, and thought leader whose work uses history as a lens to challenge systems of exclusion. Roger’s plays are theatrical mythologies for the marginalized, especially those who are Queer, Black, Filipinx, TGNC, plus-sized, and previously erased from the classical canon. They currently serve as Special Faculty at The California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and have taught Playwriting and Play/Screen/Writing courses for Lambda Literary. ​ Their plays include BILL, THE DUAT, LAVENDER MEN, THE PRIDE OF LIONS, CALIFAS TRILOGY (CALIFORNIA STORY, HIDE & HIDE, and JUANA MARIA), THE PINK, WAITING FOR A WAKE, and NIGHT CITIES: A BAYARD RUSTIN RITUAL. The award-winning cinematic adaptation of their play, LAVENDER MEN is available to stream online on AppleTV+. Roger is an alum of Page 73’s Interstate 73 Writers Group, Primary Stages Writing Cohort, the Fire This Time Festival, and Ma-Yi Theater Company’s Writers Lab. Roger holds degrees from Princeton University, Middlebury College, and Northwestern University.