When Ann-Marie MacDonald set out to write the play that became Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), she wanted to get revenge on Shakespeare.
Then she re-read him.
The resulting play premiered in 1988, in a production directed by Baņuta Rubess. It was a topsy-turvy comedy that unleashed the queer and feminist possibilities already latent in Will’s words. In the almost four decades since, MacDonald has become a Canadian household name as a playwright, novelist, and performer, while Goodnight Desdemona earned its author a Governor General’s Award and became a much-studied classic of the country’s theatre canon.
This November, Canadian Stage will produce a revival of the acclaimed play at the Bluma Appel Theatre. It’s been 25 years since the play’s last outing in the same building. Alisa Palmer, MacDonald’s frequent collaborator and life partner, directed that previous production, with MacDonald herself playing Goodnight Desdemona’s protagonist, a hapless academic named Constance Ledbelly. To add oomph to the anniversary, both artists are reprising those roles.
“ I’m excited to get a chance to do it again,” said MacDonald in a phone interview. “When I think about the young woman who wrote the play, I feel tenderness, amusement, admiration, and affection — so many things that I couldn’t feel for myself at the time. I’m just really grateful to that kid who had so much bounce, so much anger, but so much goodwill. This play still leans into that.”
For a young queer woman trying to find her voice in 1980s Canadian theatre, anger — toward Shakespeare and the institutions that gatekept him — was the only logical emotion. As one might expect from the writer of multi-generational stories like Fall on Your Knees, MacDonald described her childhood with an expansive metaphor.
“I had your basic relationship with Shakespeare,” she recalled. “You know how, most Canadians, they can skate? We can glide forward, maybe glide backwards, maybe stop on one side [of the rink] or crash gently into the boards of the skate bank. There’s no question of anyone doing a crossover, but we have that basic level.
“Sexism kept me out of hockey as a kid,” she continued. “But sexism also shut me out of Shakespeare. I’m of the generation that rarely allowed a woman to play any of those many male roles. At the time, [19th-century stage actor] Sarah Bernhardt was still duly famous for having been one of the only ones who ever did it. Shakespeare was the icon of which I’d been told, ‘Don’t touch that, you’ll break it. Or, if you’re going to touch, you better put on these high heels and this gown, and have this cleavage, and waft about until we kill you.’ Fuck that.”
When Canadian theatre started to let Shakespeare get homoerotic, it was often strictly dudes-only.
“The first Shakespeare I ever saw was John Wood’s 1978 production of Troilus and Cressida, at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa,” said MacDonald. “In Troilus there was a scene with all these, mostly naked — lots of bums, okay? — young men literally snapping towels at each other. Many years later, Robin Phillips’ 1987 production of Romeo and Juliet at Stratford featured a scene in a sauna, with all the Verona dudes naked snapping towels at each other. Those were not the only two [productions to feature this]! It was a theme.” (MacDonald pokes fun at this highly specific trend in Goodnight Desdemona.)
Despite the steam room antics onstage, at the time there was no question of the actors working on a major Stratford production being publicly out as queer, or of a woman shattering the Shakespearean glass ceiling. “It was so heteronormative, so gender-policed, that when it came to starting work on Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), I was going to take my revenge on Shakespeare,” MacDonald remembered. “I was gonna take the piss out of Shakespeare, because Shakespeare was a pile of patriarchal bullshit.”
As a different famous writer once put it, “know your enemy.” So MacDonald did a deep dive into the plays she’d found so frustrating.
“I realized that a lot of what I’d thought Shakespeare’s heroines and female roles were, was a waxy buildup from the 19th century,” she said, “one that still cast its horrid, bloated, sexist spell over the 20th century. I decided, ‘I’m scraping everything away. I’m just going to read these words.’”
For MacDonald, it was like finally being allowed on the rink, with permission to learn more than how to crash gently.
“You take a power skating course, and you start to get it,” she said. “The momentum, the speed, the thrill, the possibilities for improvisation… When I read the words, they were not the words of victims. These women are victimized, and they’re victimized on the altar of paternalism for sure. But I discovered, at 26 years old, that Juliet is a liar, and she’s horny, and she’s going to do what she’s going to do [to achieve her goals].”
MacDonald made a similar discovery when she read Othello. “Desdemona does the same thing that Juliet does — she lies, she elopes — but she has more dignity and maturity. Othello talks about how she fell in love with him, because she heard him talk about how he’d suffered. I thought, ‘Yeah, but she’s also that close to the battle when she’s with you — leading armies and figuring out strategy. She even says, [to paraphrase], ‘Dude, I wish I were you.’”
“That’s how I felt about Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry,” said MacDonald, laughing. “As a young dyke who did not fit a normative gender mold, I thought, ‘I get it.’
“Now I was power skating in Shakespeare.”
MacDonald started to wonder what would have happened to Desdemona and Juliet if they hadn’t died at the end of their respective plays. (The possibility continues to inspire — the musical & Juliet has its heroine eschew self-slaughter and head to France with her besties on a journey of self-discovery.)
In a deep dive into academic studies, MacDonald read the work of scholars who lamented that Othello and Romeo and Juliet were “tainted tragedies,” because they relied too much on misunderstandings and chance events.
“I went, ‘Thank you. That’s where I’m going,’” she remembered. “These academics were so upset at their hero Shakespeare for being vulgar. Dudes, theatre is vulgar! Really great art is always striped and marbled with vulgarity. That’s what keeps it alive. And you have to mess with it.”
That’s exactly what Constance does in Goodnight Desdemona. After finding herself magically transported into the worlds of Othello and Romeo and Juliet, she uses her knowledge of the plays to prevent Desdemona’s and Juliet’s deaths, freeing the characters — and herself — to act, scheme, and love beyond their prescribed roles.
“It was the first [lesbian] kiss on a Canadian stage,” said MacDonald, “which just about killed any other production of it. I literally went door to door and sent out press packages that I crafted myself, and mailed them to every artistic director in the country, begging them to give this play a chance and assuring them that a whole lot of ‘average, normal theatre-goers’ had seen it in Toronto and really liked it.’”
Times change and they don’t. Goodnight Desdemona and its author both survived 1980s sexism and homophobia. MacDonald has even started playing hockey: “I got to discover it at the age of 46,” she said, “and I haven’t turned back.” Still, the play’s skewering of patriarchy and sexism remains much-needed. “We’re dealing with — can you even call it a backlash? It’s a lash,” MacDonald reflected.
“This play is an invitation to the audience to be part of a world where you’re not kept down.”
Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) runs from November 6 to 22 at the Bluma Appel Theatre. More information is available here.
Canadian Stage is an Intermission partner. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Nathaniel Hanula-James
Nathaniel Hanula-James is a multidisciplinary theatre artist who has worked across Canada as a dramaturg, playwright, performer, and administrator.
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