About Margo Weishar

Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman to graduate from medical school in the United States, in 1849. How did she even think that she could break down the barriers so firmly held in her way? What propels someone to become a pioneer, and what do we give up along the way? Her story resonates across centuries to anyone who has fought to change the status quo. But the real Elizabeth, the one hidden from public view, was a far more complex and conflicted person than the trajectory of her accomplishments suggests. This play is about bravery, motherhood, morals, and love, and how the stories behind the stories give us much more insight into the people who change our world.

Recipient of the Nathan Hatfield Prize and Lectureship Fund, College of Physicians, Philadelphia The fund originated in 1898 with the intent of "furthering original research in medicine."

I've just experienced a staged reading of a new play by Dr. Margo Weishar. Called The Excellent Dr. Blackwell, it recounts the human story behind the ascendancy of the first woman to graduate from a medical school in the United States. It's about the sacrifices, the tears, and the single-minded determination and courage that inspired the heroic journey of this genuine American pioneer.

Dr. Weishar's finely crafted words and her deft juxtaposition of past and present (1876 Italy) takes us into the joys and sorrows of her protagonist.

This is a play that needs a wider reading and patronage, on a stage where a larger audience can participate in the passions that drove the iconic Elizabeth Blackwell into excellence.

• Margo Weishar: The Excellent Doctor Blackwell (opens in a new tab) medhum.org, interview by Guy Glass
• The Excellent Doctor Blackwell (opens in a new tab) Penn Medicine Alumni, event listing

In a dreamlike encounter framed by Fra Angelico's Annunciation, a celebrated scientist and a grieving mother confront one another over vaccines, faith, and responsibility. As both women navigate the modern public square of social media (one armed with data, the other with personal loss), power quietly shifts from expertise to belief. When persuasion succeeds only through a carefully constructed lie, the boundary between truth and faith collapses. Messenger examines what remains when certainty fails, and what people choose to believe in the end.

Messenger impressed us deeply. A very interesting and cogent piece of theater. The structural inventiveness, using the Fra Angelico Annunciation as a framing device, is inspired, and the play finds something urgent in the collision between faith, science, and the modern attention economy. The writing is confident and the ideas are compelling.

A graduate student seeks out the only Black professor in her department, convinced she has found the mentor who can show her the path to success. Instead, she is met with an unexpected refusal. What begins as a routine request for academic advising becomes a charged confrontation between two generations with profoundly different ideas about identity, authenticity, resilience, and what one person owes another. As the young woman argues that progress depends on lifting up those who follow, the professor insists that some lessons cannot be inherited: they must be lived.

Margo Weishar's play The Mentor is a beautifully written, humorous, and valid comment on the generation gap.

A young woman determined to become a playwright in eighteenth-century England is invited into a secret literary society devoted to restoring Shakespeare's original plays. There she discovers a hidden First Folio, an unexpected collaborator in the ghost of Shakespeare himself, and the painful irony that preserving another writer's legacy may come at the expense of her own.

Inspired by the true story of the Shakespeare Ladies Club, Monumental blends historical fact with theatrical invention to explore authorship, ambition, legacy, and the invisible women behind cultural history. At its heart, the play asks a timeless question: who gets remembered, and who made remembrance possible?

On the eve of a record-breaking transatlantic flight, legendary aviator Beryl Markham looks back on the choices that made her extraordinary, and the personal costs of refusing to live within the boundaries set for women of her time.

Set against the breathtaking landscapes of colonial Kenya and the dangerous early years of aviation, Clearing Clouds explores ambition, freedom, love, and reinvention through the life of one of the twentieth century's most daring women. As memory and history collide, Beryl confronts the relationships that shaped her and the legacy she hopes to leave behind.

Inspired by the remarkable true story of the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west, Clearing Clouds is an intimate portrait of a woman determined to chart her own course, no matter the cost.