Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet)

Anton Wagner is an assistant professor of Theatre at York University in
Toronto.

Winner of both a Chalmers Canadian Play Award and the 1990 Governor
General’s Literary Award for drama, Goodnight Desdemona is one of the
most remarkable Canadian plays of the past decade. The author has
concocted a dazzling cocktail of Shakespearean comedy, fantasy, mystery,
and farce to create a Jungian quest drama in which a meek, exploited
Queen’s University graduate student, Constance Ledbelly, tests her own
mettle and discovers her own identity. Searching for the original play
texts on which Shakespeare based his Othello and Romeo and Juliet,
Constance is magically transported to Cyprus and Verona, where she
creates comic havoc in the lives of Shakespeare’s characters, who all
fall in love with her. MacDonald admirably captures Shakespeare’s
dialogue and convincingly recreates Desdemona and Romeo and Juliet as
living characters before our eyes. Goodnight Desdemona would be an
imaginative stimulus—in either reading or production—for students
studying Shakespeare’s plays, though the comic emphasis on gender
confusion would require a somewhat sophisticated audience.