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Kestral Productions Presents:GOODNIGHT DESDEMONA (GOOD MORNING JULIET)
By Ann-Marie MacDonald
Directed by Madeleine Ingridsdotter
Co-Produced by David Huss & Lorraine Wilde
Canadian author, actor, and playwright Ann-Marie MacDonald is one of Director Madeleine Ingridsdotter's favorite authors, so this production is a bit of a tribute.
Ingridsdotter also developed their own love of Shakespeare after playing Marc Antony in Kestral Productions' 2026 All-Woman production of Shakespeare's JULIUS CAESAR at New Prospect Theatre.
"Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) is an exuberant comedy and feminist revisioning of Shakespeare’s Othello and Romeo and Juliet. It takes us from a dusty office in Canada’s Queen’s University, into the fraught and furious worlds of two of Shakespeare’s best-known tragedies, and turns them upside-down.
Constance Ledbelly is the beleaguered “spinster” academic, and unlikely heroine who embarks on a quest for Shakespearean origins and, ultimately, her own identity. When she deciphers an ancient and neglected manuscript, Constance is propelled through a very modern rabbit hole and lands smack in the middle of the tragic turning points of each play in turn. Her attempts to save first Desdemona, then Juliet, from their harrowing fates, result in a wild unpredictable ride through comedy and near-tragedy, as mild-mannered Constance learns to love, sword-fight, dance Renaissance-style, and master a series of disguises…
Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) a gender-bendy, big-hearted and crazily intelligent romp, where irony and anger sing in perfect harmony with innocence and poignancy."
From Banuta Rubess, the first director, Toronto, Dec. 1989:
"...the greatest pleasure of the piece is its scope--in terms of content, in terms of theatricality, and ultimately, in terms of the place it gives women. The women of Goodnight Desdemona are always active, always pushing the piece forward, threatening, seductive, giving up, rallying, stabbing, kissing, embracing, thinking. Their astounding variety seems logical considering the woman who created them. After all, Ann-Marie MacDonald is herself a feminist, a raconteur, adventurer, actor, and scholar with a Sargasso Sea of a mind."
Awards
1989 Chalmers Award for Best New Play
1990 Governor General’s Award for Drama
1991 Canadian Authors’ Association Award for Drama
Reviews of the Original Productions:
“Clever, pointed and entertaining… This play is one of the wildest and wooliest feminist reappraisals that the theatre has seen, and one of the most intellectually ambitious.”
--The Globe and Mail
“Stratford-upon-Acid: that’s where MacDonald’s dizzying Goodnight Desdemona lives… MacDonald traipses through the canon with glee… Lots of clever fun.”
--The Village Voice
Auditions to be held in early October 2026.
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Event venue
New Prospect Theatre, 207 Prospect St, Bellingham, WA 98225-4403, United States
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