AISLE SAY Boston
Good Night, Desdemona
By Ann Marie MacDonald
Directed by Cecil MacKinnon
At the Stables Theatre
Shakespeare & Co. Lenox July 1995
Reviewed by G.L. Horton
Ann-Marie MacDonald's Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) is an allusive
romp for a quick-changing cast of classically trained actors, an excessively silly
in-joke for Shakespeareans of all sorts: actors, scholars, wise men and fools.
The heroine, Constance Ledbelly (Robin Hynek), is a drudging mouse of a PhD candidate
in thrall to the English department's charismatic star, Professor Claude Knight
(Robert Lohbaur). Connie, noticing that Othello and Romeo and Juliet both turn
on the sort of coincidence more suited to comic plots than tragic ones, decides
that originally the plays were comedies, complete with happy endings; and that
the indecipherable manuscript she has found holds both the Ur-versions and the
answer to the mystery of Authorship. Hyneck is nearly perfect as Constance, quite
profoundly ridiculous as she travels through time and imagination to meet her
literary idols in person and alter the plots of their lives. Kim Huffman is a
magnificent Amazonian Desdemona, Tom Partipilo persuasive as a boundlessly fickle
Romeo. Ann Podlozny is vocally splendid as a teen age Juliet bent on romantic
agony,--- but physically she's a matron, and a bit on the stodgy side. Both Iago
and Tybalt seem to be out of Andrew Borthwick-Leslie's range, and as Mercutio
and Othello Antonio Ocampo could use a bit more matter and a bit less Del Arte.
But as a troupe the Shakespeareans attack this trifle with gusto, and make it
fly. Under the breakneck direction of Cecil MacKinnon, and with costume and set
designers Lohbauer and Locks supplying everything the actors need to work with
and not one ruffle or flourish more,. they speak the speeches trippingly and dash
off dangerous duels and play each instant transformation to the hilt. In their
hands the script seems half as long, twice as probable, and five times as funny
as it was at the Nora Theatre a few seasons back.