Blue Bridge Repertory Theatre is known for thinking outside the box, and Goodnight Desdemona, (Good Morning Juliet) is no exception to that. Written in 1988 by Canadian author Ann Marie Macdonald, Goodnight Desdemona is a comedy written through the eyes and thoughts of English professor Constance Ledbelly, who, while in the process of proving underlying meanings in Shakespeare’s plays for her thesis, ends up living in her own imagination, in many different times and spaces.
“This is actually [Macdonald’s] first play,” says Blue Bridge artistic director Tamara McCarthy. “She did such a great job, though, with this debut, that it’s now become an iconic classic play that is studied by theatre students all across the country.”
McCarthy says Goodnight Desdemona is a feminist piece, so it also has an education component to it.
“It’s a comedy, and very clever,” says McCarthy. “Constance Ledbelly, the protagonist, is trying to prove that Othello and Romeo and Juliet are in fact comedies, not tragedies. She is just plodding along, and not getting any advancement in her workplace, a familiar story. While going through her office waste basket, she gets sucked into this vortex, entering the world of 17th-century Shakespearean times.”
McCarthy says that she learns something new every time she reads the play.
“I always discover a bunch of new gems and hidden treasures in the script, so I’m really excited to be working on it,” she says. “It is, like I said, a Canadian classic, even though it was just written in the 1980s.”
McCarthy says that being a collaborator is her top value when directing a piece.
“Putting a team together who really work well together, who jam on ideas and create things collectively—that’s how I like to work, so when we held auditions, it was important to me to cast not just who I thought would be good in these parts. It was about providing opportunity,” she says. “So, we held open auditions; we had over 150 submissions from across the country. It was quite surprising.”
McCarthy is excited about the diverse team working on Goodnight Desdemona, which includes Lucy McNulty, who plays Ledbelly.
“Who doesn’t want to play Constance Ledbelly?” says McCarthy. “She has even more lines than Hamlet, who I guess had the most lines before, so she is a very powerful lead. We have, in fact, quite a range of folks in the show. So much talent.”
There has been an enormous amount of research done to produce Goodnight Desdemona.
“In general, audiences won’t realize what goes into putting on something like this,” says McCarthy. “Who is the character? What time period do they come from? There are a lot of shared documents going into our Google Drive as our team figures it out, before meeting with the costume designer to go over preliminary sketches.”
McCarthy says she is taking care of the choreography, and has also hired a fight director, as there is sword fighting involved.
“It’s like acting gymnastics,” she says. “There so many people on the team you really do not know about when you’re just watching the show. I’m learning a lot just by doing this. It gets me thinking about when we are staging this, how we really must find the right sort of pocket. A lot of it has to do with casting, because there are many actors who can stand up and be funny… But playing the honest truth of a character, it’s way funnier if they’re living their truth. Getting actors who aren’t afraid to get up and be in a vulnerable state.”
Goodnight Desdemona, (Good Morning Juliet)
Various times, Tuesday, April 25 to Sunday, May 7
Various prices,
Blue Bridge Theatre
bluebridgetheatre.ca