Ithaca College Theatre Opens 2000–2001 Season with Comedy

Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) will raise the curtain on Ithaca College Theatre’s 2000–2001 season. Performances in the Clark Theatre will run September 28–30 and October 3–7, with a preview on Wednesday, September 27. Performance times for what the Washington Post calls "a classic Saturday Night Live sketch that keeps working for two hours" will be 8:00 p.m., with a Saturday matinee on October 7 at 2:00 p.m.

Tickets go on sale Monday, September 25, with single-ticket prices from $3.50 to $9.00. Discounts for groups of 15 and more can be purchased by calling 274-3796. The box office is open Monday to Friday, noon to 5:00 p.m., in Dillingham Center. For more information call 274-3224.

Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) is both a hilarious Shakespearean parody and a thought-provoking comedy of the sexes. At the center of the story is a spinsterly university lecturer named Constance Ledbelly, who has become a laughingstock in her small academic circle, not just for her hopeless crush on a teaching colleague but also for her obsession with an oddball literary theory—that the tragedies Othello and Romeo and Juliet are hasty rewrites of earlier and now lost comedies. As Constance tries to decipher an arcane text that may be the source for the two works in question, a hallucinatory tornado whisks her off to Cyprus and Verona, where she finds herself transplanted into the two Shakespearean masterpieces with her own special role to play.

In summing up the play, a critic for the Memphis Commercial Appeal wrote, "Imagine a collaboration between Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, and Woody Allen."

Director and associate professor of theater arts Norm Johnson Jr. is entering his 11th year as a member of the Ithaca College faculty. He is also active with the Kitchen Theatre Company, having spent three seasons as that organization’s artistic director. This year he will direct two Kitchen Theatre productions, True West and Six Apparitions of Lenin Appear on the Piano.

The cast includes Ronica V. Reddick ’02 as Constance Ledbelly, Ben Tostado ’01 as Othello, Crystal Walker ’01 as Desdemona, Meredith Shottes ’01 as Juliet, and Adam Kaokept ’02 as Romeo.

The artistic team is composed of Johnson, stage manager Bonnie Brumbaugh ’01, costume designer Greg Robbins, sound designer John Bracewell, and lighting designer Anastasia Pridlides ’01.

The Ithaca College Theatre season will continue with A Little Night Music, a Tony Award winner that explores the tangled relationships between members of upper-crust Swedish society. The Stephen Sondheim score includes the classic tune "Send In the Clowns." The production runs October 26 through 28 and October 31 through November 2.

Other season offerings include

• Horton Foote’s Lily Dale, which runs from November 30 through December 2 and December 5 through 9,
• Claudio Monteverdi’s opera, L’incoronazione di Poppea (The Coronation of Poppea), which runs February 22 through 25,
• Side Show, a musical by Bill Russell and Henry Krieger, running March 29 through 31 and April 3 through 7,
• The Trojan Women, by Euripides, which runs April 26 through 28.