Some 400 years after Shakespeare conceived a character who kills his wife for believing she's been unfaithful — all over a misplaced handkerchief, mind you — the brutality of intimate partner violence detailed in Othello feels disturbingly contemporary. A 2014 study from a Northwestern Medicine review of research noted that anywhere from 25% to 75% of queer people experience physical, sexual, or psychological harm in their relationships. It was difficult not to think of this statistic while watching an all-female cast perform the play — a tragedy culminating in the murder of not one, but two wives at the hands of their partners.

As part of The Public Theater's Public Forum Drama Club Series, "An Evening With Desdemona and Emilia" brought together exclusively women — including novelist Meg Wolitzer and the actors Cynthia Nixon and Uzo Aduba — to perform certain Othello scenes this past Monday, March 16, for one night only.

Othello's wife, Desdemona, "is the most famous victim of domestic violence in literary history," the show's director, Jeremy McCarter, told BuzzFeed News. He went on to say that Emilia, the wife of Othello's tormentor Iago, is a victim of the same fate. "Their stories got even more timely — horrifically so — last week when the U.N. released a report saying that 1 in 3 women globally have suffered domestic physical violence. That's more than a billion women facing the kind of abuse that Desdemona and Emilia sustained."

To place the play's currents of jealousy and rage into a contemporary context, the performance's stage directions were read by Liz Roberts, chief program officer for Safe Horizon, the largest domestic violence service agency in the U.S. "Of the 100,000 calls a year Safe Horizon receives from the New York," Roberts said. "Many of them sound like Desdemona." Victims of abuse are often accused of being sluts and whores ("strumpet" is Othello's own accusation of choice), and women subjected to those verbal assaults internalize the blame, said Roberts. "They think, If only I loved him better."