Active from 1904 to 1978, the Montana Masquers student group at the University of Montana’s School of Fine Arts was originally organized as the Quill and Dagger Society to stage theatrical productions. Daniel Bandman, a professional actor who had retired to Montana, helped stage the first play. By 1918, the group became the Masquer Theatre Organization, then later the Montana Masquers. In the 1920s Professor Carl Glick helped establish the first permanent home for the Masquers on campus in Simpkins Hall. Simpkins had been used to handle the influx of trainees during World War I. Names of prominent theatre people dot the University's drama history. John Mason Brown, who later became an internationally known drama critic, helped launch the UM program. Alexander Dean, whose text on directing was the "bible" for a generation of theatre students established, with his wife Virginia, a theatre scholarship, funding it with royalties from his textbook. After leaving UM, Donal Harrington appeared on Broadway and then headed the theatre department at the University of Washington. Charles Dill, class of 1928, was on the New York stage and his classmate, track record holder Arnold Gillette, established a national reputation in academic theatre.

In 1930, much of the impetus for including a theater in the Student Union Building proposal to the Board of Regents came when Lennox Robinson of the Abbey Theater in Dublin helped the Masquers produce "Juno and the Paycock." As UM was one of the few schools in the United States to produce this play, it brought national recognition to the University in American theater circles and added to the push for a theater facility in the soon-to-be-constructed building.

The Masquers student group stopped producing plays after 1978.