Intended for mature audiences, the play is a comic deconstruction of Shakespeare's Othello, focusing on the wrongly-accused and suffering wife depicted in that tale, Desdemona. But in the hands of Pulitzer Prize-winner Paula Vogel, Desdemona is far from the quivering naif we came to know in Othello.

Open about having slept with Othello's entire encampment, and using her carnality like a poker chip, Desdemona struts like a sorority queen, trades places with prostitutes for overnight thrills, and revels over her bawdy tales of conquest with the other integral, and now re-imagined, women of this Shakespeare tragedy: Emilia, Desdemona's servant and the wife of Iago, and Bianca, now a majestic whore of Cyprus. Ever mindful, though, that the one man with whom Desdemona hasn't slept with is the one for whom she'll die, Vogel's play aligns its tongue in cheek humour with the seriousness of a modern inquiry: what were the roles women had to play then, and still have to play now?