Goodnight is truly a good night out

BAILA LAZARUS EDITOR

I have to admit that, during the first 10 minutes of Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), I was a little worried. The play opened as a serious drama with an over-acting "old maid" of a PhD student fretting over a thesis she is writing. A specialist in Shakespearean literature, Constance Leadbelly (Cailin Stadnyk) was reading her thesis to the audience on Shakespearean tragedy and, not only was the acting ridiculously excessive, I began to worry I'd have to remember all the nuances of her thesis to understand the play.

Thankfully, the play is not a serious drama and the thesis is repeated throughout the performance just in case one forgets it every now and then.

Far from taking itself seriously, in fact, Ann-Marie Macdonald's Goodnight is a hilarious look at Shakespearean drama, somewhere in the vein of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court meets Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

As the play opens, our frustrated protagonist is trying to decipher a clue that may prove that two of Shakespeare's tragedies – Othello and Romeo and Juliet – were actually comedies stolen from another source. Constance believes that each comedy had a fool and, by removing the fool, Shakespeare transformed the plays. She thinks Shakespeare gave the original source material to Gustav the Alchemist to turn into code and all she has to do is figure out the code in order to figure out the original author of the plays.

In present day, Constance is the unsung assistant of a literature professor who has her write all his work for him. Not only does he not show any appreciation for her efforts but he steals a position at Oxford University that should have been hers. She struggles with her Shakespeare/Gustav thesis – a theory that has gotten her laughed out of academic circles – and now the professor, whom she worships, has betrayed her. In the process of throwing out the trappings of her life that surround her in her office, Constance is transported into the past and lands in Shakespearean Europe, smack in the middle of Othello.

Fully versed in the language and context of the events, she is able to converse with and understand the characters in a way that suggests she is an oracle (a "vestal" oracle, to be exact).

She saves the relationship between Othello (James Rowley) and Desdemona (played as a hilarious send-up of Xena Warrior Princess by Leanne Koehn). Constance even befriends Desdemona, following her into battle, enboldening her own rather mousey character.

The dialogue is fast and crazy – a mind-bending mix of current and Shakespearean vernacular, with one-liners (sometimes groaners) dropping every minute.

When the professor protests that Constance is obsessed with the theory of the Gustavian manuscript, she explains, "I'm a fallen Catholic; it's left me with a streak of who-done-it."

When she finds out she's supposed to transfer to a position in Saskatchewan, she laments that she hates the Prairies.

"The Prairies is an absolute of absolutes and I'm a relativist," she whines.

But funnier by far is the interplay of current language with Shakespearean dialect. When Desdemona's look turns confused at Constance's use of the word "creep," Constance must explain that it refers to "a base annoysome knave."

After Cyprus, Constance is transported to Italy where she stumbles into Romeo and Juliet. She is mistaken to be a boy by the protagonists (because she is wearing pants) and is hit on by both Romeo (Jeff Gladstone) and Juliet (Anna Cummer). Through it all, she still searches for the fool in order to find the author of the plays. Some of the funniest scenes come from the fine acting of Cummer (as Juliet) as she tries to seduce Constance. At first, thinking she's a boy, she throws herself at Constance to replace her now boring Romeo, in a last fling before her 14th (sob!) birthday; then, when she finds out Constance is a woman, she doesn't skip a beat before suggesting they merge on the island of Lesbos.

Even given the hilarity of the play, however, there were still some concerns I had with questionable directions. At one point in our introduction to the Romeo/Juliet part of the play, the characters take on a distinctly rap/street-smart type of attitude. These are soon lost by all, except for Tybalt, who morphs into a weird Shakespearean Ted from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Then there's Juliet's nurse, a male actor in drag, who plays the scene as if it's a sketch on Monty Python's Flying Circus. It's very funny but still seems an odd choice. Over all, the acting is pretty campy, but can be forgiven through the tears of laughter.

By the end of the play, through her interactions with the Shakespearean characters, Constance not only satisfies her curiosity with regard to Gustav's manuscript but she survives an existential crisis and comes out the stronger for it. And we, the audience, are cheering her on all the way.

Both an actor as well as playwright, Macdonald was nominated for a Genie Award in 1988 for her supporting role in the Canadian film I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, directed by Patricia Rozema, and was nominated again in 1990 for her portrayal of a sympathetic teacher at a native residential school in the CBC television drama Where the Spirit Lives. Most recently she appeared in the film Better Than Chocolate.

Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) won the 1990 Governor General's Award and has become the most-produced Canadian play ever, with at least 100 productions nationally and internationally, including in the United States, England and Japan. MacDonald herself played the title role of Constance Leadbelly in a 2001 revival of the play at Canadian Stage in Toronto.

In addition, MacDonald's first novel, Fall on Your Knees, was an international best-seller and received the Commonwealth Prize and other awards. Her second novel, The Way the Crow Flies, was published in 2003.

Goodnight Desdemona is at Presentation House in North Vancouver until April 9. Call 604-990-3470 for tickets and more information.

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