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
