Desdemona’s Child follows the story of a young woman revisiting the town from her youth where police misconduct and a large flood forced her out twenty years ago. She comes back now with the urging of her mother’s ghost to uncover the stories behind why her parents died and discovers that the people are going through the same struggles that they were when she was young.

Three of the scenes in this play were written with the express intention from the playwright that their text be used as the lyrics for three songs. We decided to set the play generally around the Pittsburgh area and so I wrote the songs to bring out the kind of Appalachian Folk tradition that still resides in that region.

After working on the development of this play for six months and then starting rehearsals the world was hit with Covid-19 and we had to rebuild our production to take place in a zoom performance setting. Still we built the show together and developed some unique performance language to help us understand how to create work during these times.