Goodnight Desdemona, Good Morning Juliet, Southwestern University, September 30 - October 4

Ann-Marie MacDonald's Goodnight Desdemona, Good Morning Juliet is a lighthearted little romp that sends up both Shakespeare and the academic ivory tower with a mischievous feminist sense of humor

Our heroine Constance Ledbelly is an undistinguished worker bee in the literature department of an unidentified university, where she has worked ably without recognition for her pompous supervisor Professor Claude Night. Her devotion to him is absolute but irrational, for he's a caricature of self-centered male vanity, interested principally in attractive female undergraduates and in getting his full professorship.

Connie has her own wild thesis about Shakespeare, one that will make or more likely break her already flattened career. She thinks that someone, somewhere, rewrote Romeo and Juliet and Othello to turn them into tragedies. All those deaths could have been avoided, if only there had been a truth-telling Fool to clear up the misunderstandings. She is toting around a copy of an undeciphered 300-year-old manuscript that she hopes will confirm her hypothesis.

That is, until the good Prof. Night dumps her and heads off to a well-paid post at Oxford with one of his bimbos. At that point either Connie has a serious psychotic episode or else she really does travel to the mystical worlds of Othello in Cyprus and then to the Capulets and Montagues in Verona. Plopped down into each intrigue at the crucial moment, Connie promptly clears up the misunderstandings, putting Iago into the doghouse and forestalling the duel in the piazza that triggers tragedy in Verona.

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Buried Child by Sam Shepard, Southwestern University, April 22 - 26

Sam Shephard's Buried Child gives such a strange, phantasmagoric world that one's first impulse might be to play it for laughs. In Shephard's introduction to the printed edition he speaks of revising the text for the 1995 Steppenwolf theatre company in Chicago and of director Gary Sinese's "instinct to push the characters and situation in an almost burlesque territory, which suddenly seemed right."

At Southwestern University, director Jared J. Stein and his exemplary young ensemble of players create Shephard's horrible world without a trace of mockery. We are obliged to take seriously this collection of incomprehensibly distorted and injured individuals, and the result approaches the seriousness and purpose of classical tragedy.

This ample but claustrophobic farmhouse exists in an undefined locale, in a state of malaise. Ill, coughing, and stationary on the sofa is Dodge, a foul-tempered old man who swills whiskey on the sly; his wife Halie is at first unseen, heard from upstairs in a long, self-preoccupied nagging litany. Two grown sons eventually appear. Tilden, a raw stunned man in a glistening yellow rainslicker and mud-caked boots; and later, Bradley, a one-legged brute and coward who regularly sneaks into the house at night to give his sleeping father Dodge haircuts with the brutality of a sheep-shearer. Halie leaves in the first act to call on clergyman Father Dewis and in Act Three, the next day, returns with Dewis in tow, chatting with unseemly familiarity and bearing a bouquet of yellow roses.

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