Goodnight Desdemona takes silly spin on Shakespeare

Aaron Yeo

Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet)

Written by Ann-Marie MacDonald
Directed by Marianne Copithorne
Starring Andrea Jorawsky, Robert Markus, Karyn Mott, Darren Paul, Tatyana Rac, and Sarah Sharkey
Runs November 26–December 5. No show Sunday.
Tickets $5-20 at the Timms box office or at www.tixonthesquare.ca

What would happen if two of Shakespeare’s most well-known tragedies, Othello and Romeo and Juliet, were rewritten as comedies? Perhaps they were even intended to be comedies all along!

This concept is the doctoral thesis of PhD student Constance Ledbelly — one of the characters in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s play Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) — but she’s struggling to find the evidence to prove it. That is, until she tumbles down, down, down into a wastebasket and finds herself magically dropped into Othello’s Cyprus and, later, into Romeo and Juliet’s Verona. In quick time, Constance bumps into the kooky characters from these plays and support for her theory starts to pile up.

According to Karyn Mott (Juliet), audiences will be rolling out of their seats with laughter when they see how some of Shakespeare’s most well-known characters have been transformed.

“They’re heightened to a different extent than they are in the original play,” she laughs, pointing out that the character archetypes aren’t really “transformed,” per se, just exaggerated to the point of ridiculousness.
Juliet, for example, becomes just your stereotypical melodramatic 14-year-old girl, where every tiny decision is live-or-die — more often the latter, as it turns out.

“Juliet tries to kill herself a lot,” Mott deadpans. “She tries real hard.”

Sarah Sharkey, who's making her Studio Theatre debut in the role of Desdemona, notes that her character is the opposite.

“My archetype is a raging, bullish, warrior princess,” she chuckles.

“Another interesting thing is that in Othello and in Romeo and Juliet, our two characters would never meet,” Mott points out. “And, in this play, [...] our archetypes go head-to-head.”

The result, of course, of two over-the-top characters meeting is something even more over-the-top, but Sharkey says the production manages to walk the line between being a satire and being a valentine.

“I think it’s very much both,” she says. “I mean, to make fun of something is quite endearing. People love to laugh. So, to parody something is essentially to love it, to give it an homage — it’s kind of like a roast.

“Our goal was to make this the funniest journey we possibly could,” Sharkey continues. “So, anyone who will sit down and watch it will enjoy the pure comedy of it all: there are SNL kind of moments; there are YouTube comedy clip moments [...] There are also these elements of Die Hard. It’s very fast-paced; there’s a lot of action and stage fighting to it.”

“And there are a lot of surprises,” Mott offers.

“Yes, be prepared for surprises,” Sharkey menaces, before breaking down into laughter.