Meet the Director: Margot Bordelon

“I don’t know any woman who hasn’t engaged in this kind of mental gymnastics. I certainly have. It’s absurd, but also unavoidable in the world that we live in.” — Margot Bordelon

In director Margot Bordelon’s latest venture—POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive—she creates a construct where we can’t help but empathize with characters engaging in the absurd. No stranger to working with such characters, Bordelon uses her well-honed directorial skills to pack a surprising punch with this political farce.

Her Path to the Director’s Chair

Hailing from Everett, Washington, Bordelon fell in love with live performance in high school, and then went on to Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle to study acting. However, she soon discovered directing and realized she loved it. She described her passion for directing in 2022, saying that she loved “having a hand in every aspect of a production” and “[working] in multiple mediums at once—acting, dancing, music, design.” This hands-on, collaborative approach rests at the core of her style.

Trust in Her Team

Bordelon works closely with her creative team in order to best bring to life the vision of the playwright, as well as the creative character ideas of her actors. She stated in an interview with Roundabout Theatre Company that she believes it is vital to “understand a playwright’s moment-to-moment intention so [she] can work towards achieving that first with the actors.” There’s strong trust between Bordelon and POTUS playwright Selina Fillinger forged through years of collaboration. Fillinger praised Bordelon at POTUS’ First Rehearsal Presentation:

“I would trust her with any and every play that I’ve ever written…she’s a master director [and] I’m so excited to see what she does in the round.” — Selina Fillinger

A History of Productions with Bite

Bordelon is no stranger to taking on social commentary. She directed the world premiere of Miranda Rose Hall’s Plot Points in Our Sexual Development at Lincoln Center’s Claire Tow Theater in 2018. In the relationship drama, one of the characters self-describes as a “genderqueer trans person who is not a woman and is not a man, but is kind of a man, who loves lesbian jokes.” Centered around two frustrated queer adults tracking the progression of their romance from a young age, the play chronicled their high and lows with both stark honesty and empathy.

Bordelon continues to focus her directorial efforts on new, cutting edge material. As she put it in an interview with The Interval, “The moment that someone says ‘c*nt,’ [in Plot Points] there is going to be complete silence because it is a dangerous word.”

POTUS

Speaking of dangerous words, POTUS has them in abundance. In fact, not only is the first word in the play “c*nt,” it is repeated many, many times. However, at no point does the word lose its power because of the multitude of contexts, intonations, and feelings put behind it by different characters. The characters inhabit a world where “c*nt” is not treated as a showstopping slur so much as a banal insult released from the lips of men for which women need to manage the fallout.