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.

Ann-Marie MacDonald is an award-winning novelist, playwright, actor, and broadcast host. Her writing for the stage includes the plays Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), Belle Moral: A Natural History, and Hamlet-911, along with the libretto for the chamber opera Nigredo Hotel, and book and lyrics for the musical Anything That Moves. She is the author of the bestselling novels Fall On Your Knees, The Way the Crow Flies, and Adult Onset. Ann-Marie is a graduate of the acting program of the National Theatre School of Canada. In 2018 she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in recognition of her contribution to the arts and her LGBTQ2SI+ activism. She is married to theatre director Alisa Palmer, with whom she has two children.

Ann-Marie MacDonald's profile page

• Winner, Governor General's Literary Award - Drama (English)

"Clever, pointed and entertaining. . . . This play is one of the wildest and woolliest 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
"A tour de force. . . . Ann-Marie delivers her message with tremendous wit, breathtaking wordplay and great gusts of knee-slapping bread comedy." —The Ottawa Citizen
"Magical. . . . An uproarious and smart comedy." —Pittsburgh Press