Marcia Johnson

Marcia Johnson began her career as an actor and still appears on stage and on TV and film. Marcia is the 2009/10 Ontario Arts Council Playwright-in-Residence at Roseneath Theatre. The last time she received this valuable grant was in 2004 at Blyth Festival. That residency led to Courting Johanna, based on Alice Munro’s short story “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” which premiered at Blyth in 2008. The script is published by Scirocco Drama. Also a librettist, Marcia wrote the short opera My Mother’s Ring, composed by Stephen A. Taylor. It was presented at the 2009 Opera to Go, produced by Tapestry New Opera and nominated for a Dora Mavor Moore Award in the Outstanding New Opera category. She continues to work with Stephen on the full-length opera Paradises Lost, based on the novella of the same title by Ursula K. Le Guin. As an actor, Marcia appeared in Andrew Moodie’s The Real McCoy at Factory Theatre in Toronto and Great Canadian Theatre Company (Ottawa), The Gladstone Variations at the Toronto Fringe Festival and on CBC’s This is Wonderland, CTV’s De Grassi: The Next Generation and Global’s da kink in my hair to name a few productions. Marcia is one of the featured Canadian playwrights at the 2009 International Women Playwrights Conference in Mumbai where she has been invited to read from her play Say Ginger Ale.