Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet)

by Juliet Fletcher

theater

It happens briefly, as part of any profound seismic cultural change: Sooner or later, someone will redirect Shakespeare to reflect Society v. 2.0. And, while recent decades' awareness of race finally blocked Olivier et al. from Othello auditions, changing tack in casting doesn't strike such a blow for feminism. Even most productions cast gender-blind leave you wondering, what does a girl have to do -- apart from shouldering an Oedipal complex -- to get a decent monologue around here?

If neither deep slices of text editing nor reconsideration of traditional casting achieve a satisfactory yet solid feminist twist on dramas dated pre-Kristeva, imagined Ann-Marie MacDonald, then there's nothing for it but to write a way out of the impasse. In Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), MacDonald's 1988 agenda play, timid Constance Ledbelly, a literary scholar, discovers a cryptic clue to the existence of a fool written into Shakespeare's tragedies who averts his more grisly denouements. Constance's frustration at persistently, politely bumping her head on the glass ceiling launches her headlong into the role of this Wise Fool -- only to find that saving the day in both Othello and Romeo and Juliet deflates the juicy pathos, then reveals the bathos of a truly happy ending.

One might even argue we're satisfied by this play and others like it because it simply rearranges Shakespeare's plot pillars and linguistic filigree into modern architecture. That assessment would be unlikely to offend MacDonald, who flips the gender switch -- Constance, masquerading as a boy, manages to attract both Romeo and Juliet -- and swipes from the putative tragic endings, knowingly abandoning some canonical traditions and retaining others. So what if, once more, a heroine can only exist and triumph in comedy? There's a ripe challenge left for the writer of an update reflecting Society v. 2.1.

Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), Sept. 30-Oct. 12, Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 2 p.m., $18-$22, Villanova University, Vasey Hall, Lancaster and Ithan aves., 610-519-7474.

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