"Allan Havis is one of the most gifted of our younger playwrights. His chief strength seems to me to be the way he shortens the distance between the private and the political. Quiet, intelligent, lyrical, his plays are that rarest of presences in the American theater: dramas that leave you with something to think about."
Richard Gilman
This collection includes three full-length plays: A DARING BRIDE, THE LADIES OF FISHER COVE, and SAINTE SIMONE. A DARING BRIDE: A doomed love story about a United Nations official from Austria who falls for a high class escort working in Manhattan. THE LADIES OF FISHER COVE: Three sisters off the coast of Maine save the life of a mysterious stranger washed ashore. SAINTE SIMONE: Spinning a textured, twin narrative on the theme of possession, SAINTE SIMONE tracks a young New York woman of our era along side the cascading coincidences of Simone Weil from Europe's 1930s.
"With [THE LADIES OF FISHER COVE], acclaimed playwright Allan Havis has given us a post-AIDS Witches of Eastwick what with three attractive, psychically bonded sisters all seduced by the same half-man, half-devil. This time, though, there's little room for whimsy. These women and every other female in the small Maine town have been quarantined because all the men have died of a horrible plague. In fact, the strange, deformed, smooth-talking visitor is the first male to survive more than a few hours of contact with these women. Havis's moody drama always keeps us guessing, its poetic moments surprisingly potent and its intentions never so obscure as to lost the audience."
On Stage
"Allan Havis has fashioned a rollicking myth that might function as a rebuke for an errant feminism or as a wish fulfillment fantasy for a third sex. Whatever its purpose, it was great fun, marked by mystery [and] wit."
J Rudolf Abate, Stages
