John Ulan

Shakespeare Shakes Spears | The Amazonian Sarah Sharkey (right) menaces Darren Paul and Tatyana Rac in Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet).

GOODNIGHT DESDEMONA (GOOD MORNING JULIET)
Directed by Marianne Copithorne. Written by Ann-Marie MacDonald. Starring Tatyana Rac, Sarah Sharkey, Karyn Mott, Darren Paul, Robert Markus. Timms Centre for the Arts (87 Ave & 112 St). To Dec 5.
****

There are two or three moments in Studio Theatre’s production of Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) that made me laugh as long and hard as anything I’ve seen onstage this year. They weren’t the most structurally clever bits, though the script, by the Canadian novelist and playwright Ann-Marie MacDonald, is full of these, too.

No, the bits I loved most were simple set-up-and-punchline gags — one involving a dopey Romeo realizing he’s been tricked, the other a similarly aloof Juliet being caught dressed up like a boy. See? Not much to either of them. Yet these small successes, more than anything, illustrate the strength and vitality running amok under Marianne Copithorne’s steady direction and conjured by a small cast of able goofballs. When this much attention is paid to even the minor jokes, you know you’re in good hands.

MacDonald’s play, written in 1988, is both a rewriting of two of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedies and a pointed feminist attack on academia. The curtain opens on Constance Ledbelly, a mousy, easily excitable assistant professor at Queen’s University. Dressed like an androgynous Payne Stewart, she’s working on a dissertation about how Othello and Romeo and Juliet were really meant to be comedies, but keeps getting roped into doing her dashing boss’s work for him — writing entire speeches and academic articles, all at the slightest flare of his skeevy charm.

He also tries to dissuade Constance from her project, which involves deciphering an arcane manuscript. But a mischievous Chorus figure appears out of nowhere, pulling her down the rabbit hole and depositing her smack into Othello’s Cyprus and Romeo’s Verona. By discovering the truth about these worlds — and in the process becoming a character within them — she will also discover herself.

It’s this opening scene that gives the play its only real stumbling block. Constance at first comes off a little one-dimensional, and the students who parade through her door, not to mention Professor Handsome himself, are all fairly predictable caricatures. Once Constance disappears down that cleverly placed trapdoor, though, there’s no looking back. She hits the ground running, and the production follows suit.

There’s an obvious pleasure in seeing these canonical texts pulled apart and Krazy-Glued back together, and MacDonald does so with the glee of an art student drawing a moustache on the Mona Lisa.

Constance first lands in Cyprus, where she promptly informs Othello of Iago’s plot to have him kill his innocent wife. Newly un-murdered, Desdemona jumps to life as a frenzied Amazonian warrior, swearing to help Constance in her quest to find a readable version of the manuscript until Iago enlists the Moor’s wife in his new scheme: exposing Constance as a witch.

Ditto for the world of Romeo and Juliet, which is reimagined as a horned-up boys’ club, full of bathhouses and R-rated krump dancing. When Constance saves Tybalt and Mercutio’s lives in their early swordfight, Romeo goes home to discover that he’s not that into his 13-year-old wife after all. The feeling, it turns out, is mutual. But then both fall for a mysterious stranger, a befuddled boy from another land named, er, Constantine.

The jokes come quick, and everyone onstage gets a chance to lob with the best of them. (Even the white nightclub diva, a minor character who regrettably speaks like a sassy black woman, has a memorable catchphrase: “Touch each other.”) As Constance, Tatyana Rac anchors the show, switching from wide-eyed babbling to straight man with ease. And Sarah Sharkey and Karyn Mott, as Desdemona and Juliet, stay utterly in their own worlds throughout, which is all the more essential when they’re thrust together at the climax.

It’s definitely a female-driven show, which is keeping with MacDonald’s politics, but both male actors also draw big laughs when called upon. Cory Sincennes deserves kudos as well for his inventive set design — particularly a stunning blood-orange moon that dangles from the rafters.

With dancing, magic, swordfighting, cross-dressing, formal trickery, and a host of belly laughs, it’s a show that ought to make even old Billy S. himself feel right at home.