Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet)

By Ann-Marie MacDonald

Constance Ledbelly is trying to decipher a coded manuscript which she believes is the lost source for Othello and Romeo and Juliet. Not only does she decode the manuscript but she literally falls into the two plays and causes each of them to turn from tragedy to comedy. "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 the author's website

About Playwright(s)

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Cast Information

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Female roles

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Non-Binary Gender Non-Conforming roles

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Monologue level

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Production and Publication

First produced

1988, Nightwood Theatre at the Annex Theatre, Toronto

Publication year

1998

Published by

Penguin Random House Canada

ISBN

9780676971699

Winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Drama, 1990.

Winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Drama, 1990.

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