Desdemona

Toni Morrison's retelling of the story of Desdemona from Shakespeare's Othello: a safe space in which the dead can finally speak those things that could not be spoken when they were alive. The women inside Shakespeare's play find their voices: Othello's mother and Desdemona's mother meet, and hidden histories are shared and begin to flow.

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The story of Desdemona from Shakespeare's Othello is re-imagined by Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison, Malian singer and songwriter Rokia Traoré, and acclaimed stage director Peter Sellars. Morrison's response to Othello is an intimate dialogue of words and music between Desdemona and her African nurse Barbary. Morrison gives voice and depth to the female characters, letting them speak and sing in the fullness of their hearts.

Desdemona is an extraordinary narrative of words, music and song about Shakespeares doomed heroine, who speaks from the grave about the traumas of race, class, gender, war and the transformative power of love. Toni Morrison transports one of the most iconic, central, and disturbing treatments of race in Western culture into the new realities and potential outcomes facing a rising generation of the 21st century.