Word: desdemona
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Goodnight Desdemona is that fear some creature, the play within a play Constance Ledbelly (Lindsey Richardson), a frumpish assistant professor from Queens, is struggling with the slings and arrows of outrageous academia. She endures an arrogant and exploitative senior professor, his disdainful girlfriend, and the ridicule of her peers, who dismiss her theory that Romeo and Juliet and Othello were adapted by Shakespeare from lost originals in which they were comedies...
Soon enough, through some incoherent bit of comic book magic, Constance is sucked through her trashcan into the world of Othello, just as Iago is about to play his fatal trick and convince the Moor to murder his wife, Desdemona. Constance exposes the deception and goes on to become Othello's favorite and Desdemona's best friend. She learns, as she had long suspected, that the "real" Desdemona is no fainting flower; rather, she yearns for a life of combat, such as she assumes Constance must enjoy in the Kingdom of Academe...
From this moment on, the play elaborates the blindingly original premise that modern life would appear pretty silly if described in Elizabethan English. When Constance, who soon slips into iambic pentameter like all the other characters, describes someone as a creep and Desdemona is mystified, she says absent-mindedly: "Creep--it's colloquial for 'base and noisome knave...
Later on, the warlike Desdemona misinterprets Constance's complaint about the "sacred cows" of Academe and announces her desire to slay the bovine monsters. It is this level of misunderstanding--the utterly conventional and predictable--that MacDonald's play attains, and never attempts to surpass...
...soon Iago is up to his old tricks, and, in a clever scene, turns Desdemona against Constance with the same words that had convinced Othello in the opening scene. Constance's only escape is another sudden jump, this time into Romeo and Juliet, where the abundant joys of sexual innuendo are added to those of Elizabethan paraphrase...