Studio Theatre

Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) fanned the flames of feminist controversy when it first debuted in 1988.

Two decades later Studio Theatre’s production running at the Timms Centre until Saturday still promotes the empowerment and autonomy of women. But director Marianne Copithorne tempers the political agenda with shameless fun that pops and crackles with Elizabethan mirth and pop culture innuendo.

In MacDonald’s literary spoof, the heroine is magically catapulted into Shakespeare’s Othello and Romeo and Juliet. A mousy academic scholar, Constance Ledbelly is obsessed with a ciphered manuscript she believes reveals the two Shakespearean tragedies were originally penned as comedies.

Constance is in the throes of an emotional crisis. Utterly besotted with her department head, she is his doormat in this one-sided relationship. Through her work, she advances his career and now he’s marrying another woman.

Magically escaping to Cyprus, Constance arrives just in time to stop Othello from choking Desdemona. Subsequently she is flung to Verona just in time to save Mercutio’s life and discovers Romeo and Juliet are missing a romantic spark.

MacDonald inverts the common perception of two doomed heroines: Desdemona is battle-thirsty, formidable Amazon, and Juliet is a boundary crossing, sexually starved adolescent.

And MacDonald’s dialogue is an easy-to-understand, delightful knotty mock-up of Elizabethan iambic pentameter mixed with contemporary vernacular that never breaks its stride.

Constance becomes Shakespeare’s reviser and a mischief-maker. Over the course of two hours, Tatyana Rac’s Constance evolves from a spineless, stuttering wreck to a lion-heart eager to right all wrongs. And Rac pulls off a warm-hearted virtuosic performance that goes through a range of emotions from stumbling shyness to shaking rage.

St. Albert resident Sarah Sharkey’s Desdemona is a terrifying, scary warrior, a perfect foil who forces Constance to assert herself. However, Sharkey’s Desdemona comes on so strong initially, she has little room to grow.

In a most memorable salute to pop culture, Andrea Jowarsky mocks fairy godmothers as a winged angel. At a masked ball in the bawdy, pleasure seeking city of Verona, she appears in a Madonna-style cone-bra grooving to Manhattan Transfer with moves crosshatched from Tina Turner and John Travolta.

MacDonald’s major theme is “know thyself.” Through Constance’s comic bewilderment and Copithorne’s balanced direction, this production hit the right recipe of levity and gravity.