October 9-15, 2003
theater
Goodnight Desdemona
(Good Morning, Juliet)
This show has all the features and all the flaws of a university production. The cute and clever script by Ann-Marie MacDonald concerns a mousy academic (Is there any other kind in cliche-land?) who has a theory about Shakespeare's plays, to wit: Romeo and Juliet and Othello are fake tragedies based on too many preventable coincidences and accidents, and therefore these two plays should have been comedies. She is convinced that there is a source Shakespeare suppressed and if she can decode it, she will prove her theory. There is lots of Shakespearean language (some real, some fake), which requires an audience who will get the references and the jokes and the iambic pentameter, and will sympathize with the timid feminist agenda.
The plot begins with Assistant Professor Constance Ledbelly, who has been cruelly exploited -- professionally and emotionally -- by a glamorous senior professor. This agenda thickens once Constance dreams her lit-crit dream in which Desdemona is not the sweet shrinking violet convention assumes she is, but is just like a female Othello: violent, passionate, bloodthirsty and adventure-loving. In Act II we meet Juliet the morning after: Bored by the schnook Romeo she married, she already longs for a new, idealized lover who cannot exist except as longed-for rather than attained. There is lots of gender-bending, cross-dressing and scene-shifting, which would be amusing if it didn't go on so long.
It would also be more amusing if the actors could actually speak the Shakespearean language reasonably well, but they can't (i.e., the aforementioned flaws of a university production). Ron Lee Jones, as both the creep professor and Othello, is almost entirely unintelligible in both roles, while Mike Dees manages to be a wimp of a Romeo but can't even come close to an Iago. The women, Kyla Marie Mostello as Desdemona and Melissa Dryslewski as Juliet, acquit themselves somewhat better. Nina Donze in the lead begins in a farcical mode with a screechy voice, but by the second act has modulated her performance into something both interesting and fun.
Director Jonathan Carr has decided on excess: loud and silly rather than subtle and witty, and although the opening-night (and therefore friends-and-family) audience laughed a lot, the show might benefit from restraint.
GOODNIGHT DESDEMONA (GOOD MORNING, JULIET)
Through Oct. 12, Villanova Theatre at Vasey Hall, Villanova, 610-519-7474
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