Desdemona, a play about a handkerchief

April 16 – 19, 2025

Joan & Edgar Booth Theatre

DESDEMONA, a play about a handkerchief, written by Pulitzer Prize-winner Paula Vogel, was directed by Grant Sorenson (CFA’25) and ran from April 16 – 19, 2025 in Boston University’s Joan & Edgar Booth Theatre. As the wrongly accused and suffering wife of Shakespeare’s Othello, Desdemona has long been viewed as the “victim of circumstance.” But as Vogel demonstrates in her comic deconstruction of Shakespeare’s play, Desdemona was far from the quivering naïf we’ve all come to know.

On stage after Desdemona in Booth from April 25 – 27, was Emilia by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm and directed by Taylor Stark (CFA’25). A riotous, witty reclaiming of the life of an exceptional woman. Four hundred years ago, Emilia Bassano wanted her voice to be heard. It wasn’t. Could she have been the ‘Dark Lady’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets? What of her own poetry? Why was her story erased from history? In Malcolm’s electrifying play, Emilia and her sisters reach out across the centuries with passion, fury, laughter and song.

“We are thinking of these two pieces less in repertory and more in conversation with each other since they run back-to-back rather than alternating performances,” says Sorenson, the director of Desdemona. “The two plays were selected to be produced together because of the shared themes and content between them, but they are also completely unique shows in their voices and storytelling. Ultimately, both plays speak very loudly and individually in their own right, which has been really exciting to put up next to each other and see where they overlap and where they diverge from each other.”

It has been a really fulfilling process working alongside Taylor and her team for Emilia while I have been developing Desdemona with my team; we have had to engage with the plays on their own terms but also as a package and that has made both of us really consider the how and the why of doing these plays. Why are we telling these stories now, and how do we tell them in the most resonant way? Both plays are about fighting to speak freely and fearlessly in times of oppression. Now more than ever it is crucial that the theatre we produce and consume can act as a call to action.

– Grant Sorenson (CFA’25), DESDEMONA, a play about a handkerchief, director

Program

Flip through the program book to learn more about the production.

Poster art for "Desdemona" featuring a Renaissance-era painting of a woman gazing rightward in front of draped fabric, colored with a neon "brat" green" filter

School of Theatre presents DESDEMONA, a play about a handkerchief, and Emilia in repertory at Booth Theatre

Produced in repertory, Desdemona retells Shakespeare’s Othello from the perspective of the play’s tragic heroine; and Emilia seeks to resurface their erased story from history.

Directors Taylor Stark and Grant Sorenson backstage at Booth Theatre

Forget “Barbenheimer.” Try “Desdemilia.”

“We’re trying to find more ways of making connections between the pieces that we do,” says Kirsten Greenidge, a CFA associate professor and director of the School of Theatre. “We’re helping those conversations to happen for audiences and also for students.”