Biography
Margo MacDonald (she/they) is a Canadian multi-award winning actor, playwright, and theatre creator who has been making theatre for over 30 years. For a good portion of that, she co-created work with the Shakespearean theatre company she had co-founded, A Company of Fools. Eventually, feeling the need to tell more of the stories she really wanted to tell - in particular, lost queer women’s history - she branched out into playwrighting.
Margo’s first play (which she also performed in) premiered in 2010. Shadows, (about lesbian theatre maverick Eva Le Gallienne) won the Ottawa Fringe (Canada) Outstanding Overall, Best of Fest, and Fan Favourite awards. It went on to the undercurrents: theatre below the mainstream festival at the Great Canadian Theatre Company (where the show’s tickets sold out a week before it opened), and has since played to rave reviews at Videofag in Toronto, Canada (curated by Jordan Tannahill and William Ellis), as well as the Tea House Theatre and RADA Fest (London, England). Her first ever solo show, The Elephant Girls, premiered at the 2015 Ottawa Fringe. There it sold out 100%, won Best of Fest, Critics’ Pick for Best Show, and Outstanding Overall. It then went on to receive three Prix Rideau Awards (Ottawa professional theatre awards) for Outstanding New Work, Outstanding Performance, and Outstanding Direction, as well as the Capital Critics’ Circle award for Best Actor. It sold out its entire run at the Winnipeg Fringe Festival (Canada) — twice. This show has toured to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Brighton Fringe, the Dublin International Gay Theatre Festival, as well as many other venues and festivals at home and abroad, and continues to tour. Her most recently produced work is The Persistent Stain (co-written with Geoff McBride), about an aging Canadian punk band, which played at the undercurrents festival in 2022. Other plays include Maupin (about a 17th-century, French, bisexual, cross-dressing, female, sword-fighter, opera singer, and duellist), and Rap Once for Yes (about Radclyffe Hall and Noel Coward holding a seance).
