Bøker av Allan Havis

A young California woman, Maddie Crawford, falls headlong into the world of QAnon. Her beliefs take her to to the Capitol, attending the Stop the Steal Rally on January 6th, and later enmeshed in the violence that followed.Maddie returns to San Diego, imagining that the local school board is about to indoctrinate children in critical race theory. Her solution is to commit an act of terrorism.Follow Maddie's journey as she navigates the political and criminal path she and her family have become embroiled in. The consequences of her radical actions, lead to a personal crisis from which she may never recover.

A promising Ethiopian soccer star in Israel is courted by an American sports agent. The athlete is involved with another Ethiopian who risks being deported. Meanwhile, there is also a reckless, clandestine operation afoot to airlift one last group of Falasha Jews from Ethiopia to Israel."In 1996, Israel announced a blood shortage and urged its citizens to give generously. The Falasha-Ethiopian Jews who were new immigrants and eager to embrace their spiritual homeland-turned out in record numbers. A newspaper report later revealed that all of the Ethiopian blood had been discarded, untested, because of a fear of AIDS and other diseases. The Ethiopians were humiliated, and the Israeli government, thrust into damage control, recognized that the people rescued from oppression from Northeast Africa (through airlift operations nobly named 'Moses' and 'Solomon') were now facing discrimination in the very state meant to be a safe harbor for all Jews. Israel's complex relationship with the Falasha (which literally means 'stranger') provides the foundation for A JEW ON ETHIOPIA STREET, Allan Havis's new play." -Caroline Palmer, American Theater"A play about the fascinating story of Ethiopian Jews." -Max Sparber, Citypages

A psychological drama that focuses on three characters - an American Jewish architect, his half-Arab banker wife, and a Moroccan colonel. MOROCCO begins with the ten-day arrest of sophisticated Abril Kempler, a banker working with her architect husband in Fez, Morocco. The ordeal involves a complex game between the Colonel running the jail and the Jewish American architect. Having Abril released from prison does not readily end the nightmare of this incident. After a brief sojourn to Malaga, Spain, Charles Kempler returns to the prison to confront the Colonel on a deeper transgression."Allan Havis's MOROCCO is an absorbing cat-and-mouse game in which one cannot always distinguish the cat from the mouse. Between the scenes and behind the lines, there is far more here than meets the eye ... In what is partly a comedy of menace, Mr Havis artfully weaves a web of suspicion around his three principal characters ... The author repeatedly encourages the audience's sense of wariness. One starts to wonder if the characters are inhabiting a Morocco of the mind, or, perhaps, a sanatorium. Step by step, we are led into Mr Havis's labyrinth. Beneath the surface, the play is concerned with politics and terrorism as well as with the polarities of personalities that can inhabit a marriage ... There are significant pieces studiously missing in Mr Havis's Pinteresque puzzle, a fact that enhances the play's tantalizing air of mystery." -Mel Gussow, The New York Times

Offbeat drama of a mother, father, and adult daughter living together inside an upscale Manhattan apartment. Daughter plays a cello and has a personality disorder. Her alter ego seduces her father who is a political media guru. Mother is conflicted in how to stop this awful charade."The family under observation in Allan Havis's MINK SONATA has affluence and political influence ... [In] this intriguing new play ... the dialog is literate and often amusing. Mr Havis has an ability to make artificial language sound in character. He has captured the jargon of people for whom solipsism may be an incurable disease ..." -Mel Gussow, The New York Times

An interrogation tale inspired loosely by the detention of Colombia's Patricia Lara in the mid-1980s. Two INS agents detain and try to break a Latin American journalist and a Brooklyn rabbi - both suspects believed to be involved with terrorist groups. The interrogations go very badly and the tables are turned against one of the INS agents."... To say that HOSPITALITY by Allan Havis betokens an auspicious beginning is an understatement of fairly large dimensions. Nearly everything about this production is first-rate. The script, an interrogation drama which brilliantly defeats the normally static two-characters-and-a-table configuration of the genre, not only is tough and taut, but gratifyingly witty and urbane ..." -Nels Nelson, Philadelphia Daily News"... a trenchant political drama that belies its innocuous title ... An exceptional script ..." -Hari., Variety

An urban family of three is faced with a medical crisis upon a second financial crisis. Structured as a memory play, this story for four actors highlights the surfacing identify of a young man caught between filial loyalty and freedom. As the mother attends to both men, a domineering father is in free fall."One young man's experience of grief and loss. A fraught father-son relationship, a tight mother-son bond. Nathan is lost and confused, trying to revisit and understand himself and the last twelve months of his life. His mother was erroneously diagnosed with cervical cancer. Heartache Number One. Then his successful, entrepreneurial father, being hounded by the I R S, is in peril of imprisonment. During the traumatic process, Dad suffers a life-threatening heart attack and later, a stroke. Nathan's safe, self-involved little world - his parents at a geographical distance, his girlfriend kept at an emotional distance, his academic life far away from the family business - spirals out of control. He has to be forced to remember, look back, process the whole series of events, by an other-worldly muse of memory ... There's a poetic and ethereal quality ... There's a deep and moving family story here, a parable for our times. As a new work, it shows considerable potential." -Pat Launer, San Diego News Network

A kinky, deranged comedy built on the sale of a vintage Ford Mustang and an unidentified body in the car. Two women meet and against their better judgment cross the border into Mexico for an unusual resort weekend. "Allan Havis, who co-directs the playwriting program at U C S D, earned his reputation for mordant wit and chilling dramatic climaxes everywhere but San Diego. Now, finally, one of his weird dramas has opened here - the creepy and highly entertaining PRIVATE PARTIES ... Billed as a Thelma and Louise kind of show, it is that, but with layers and a jaunty, laid-back So-Cal tome that'll curl your painted toenails ... the fun and provocation of this 80-minute two-hander. The gals live and breathe in the writing ... You may not want to know them better, but you come away feeling that however fantastical their trip, they're the real thing." -Anne Marie Welsh, The San Diego Union-Tribune

This stark, disquieting drama depicts the eleventh-hour effort of a hired tutor to transform the life of a very bright, self-destructive teenager before a Columbine tragedy occurs in San Diego. "... the disquieting drama visits a shockingly dysfunctional family and its truly troubled teen ... The tables turn several times in this intense, suspenseful one-act ... Especially intriguing is the fact that we never quite know at the end what really happened, or what will happen next. Is the kid really a Bad Seed? Did this amoral adolescent, under the tutor's tutelage, actually develop a conscience and a sense of remorse by the end? Will the tutor live? Havis isn't telling. I love this play. The writing is terrific, smart and slick, scary and inscrutable all at once ... The play is superb ..." -Pat Launer, Center Stage, Jazz 88.3FM (San Diego)

A fantasy drama on clairvoyance and supernatural events surrounding the life of an African American PhD candidate who is researching folklore and ghost communication within immigrant communities in California. She is bothered by the contact with her father and with the arrest of a serial killer of young children."An amazing, intriguing ghost tale that reinvests energy and wit throughout the contemporary San Diego/Tijuana landscape you'll never think of pre-school institutions and federal prisons in the same way again. This original, lyrical retelling of children's campfire boogeyman should haunt you beyond words." -Arthur Kopit

A factual dramatic account of the advancing history of the Brown v. Wade Supreme Court decision in counterpoint with the personal drama of Senator Strom Thurmond's unacknowledged mixed race daughter, Essie Mae Williams Washington.

Cult Films: Taboo and Transgression looks at nine decades of cult films history within American culture. By highlighting three films per decade including a brief summary of the decade's identity and sensibility, the book investigates the quality, ironies, and spirit of cult film evolution. The twenty-seven films selected for this study are analyzed for story content and in their respective transgressions regarding social, aesthetic, and political codes. Characteristic of this book is the notion that many exciting genres make up cult films-including horror, sci-fi, fantasy, film noir, and black comedy. Further, the book reaches out to several foreign film directors over the decades in order to view cult films as an intentional art form. Political and ideological controversies are covered; arresting back-story details that lend perspective on a film fill out the analysis and the historic framework for many film titles. The book, by emphasizing the condensed survey over decades and by choosing outstanding titles, differs from other general studies on cult films.