The character of Desdemona has a rough time of it in William Shakespeare’s "Othello." Two days after her marriage to the title character, she’s unjustly accused of infidelity and strangled by her new husband, bringing their brief honeymoon to an untimely end. She’s not the only one to die. After all, it is a tragedy.
But Desdemona, who has relatively little to say in Shakespeare’s play, finds her own voice in a theater piece written by novelist and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, in collaboration with acclaimed theater and opera director Peter Sellars and African singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré.