MOROCCO
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You don’t need to know much about Morocco to appreciate Allan Havis’s play. In fact, I suspect it helps if you know nothing at all. That makes it easier to accept its anti-Arab premise: that a prominent American businessman’s wife is arrested in Fez for what local authorities consider evidence of prostitution (sitting in a bar alone) and is then tortured, sexually abused, intentionally infected with syphilis, and kept confined while her husband is unable to do much more than visit the jail every day and blow up at the senior officer there for not letting his wife go.
Havis’s play is filled with so many familiar stereotypes–the angry American, the sadistic colonel, the corrupt judicial system–that there isn’t a single surprise or interesting plot twist in the first act of the play. In scene after scene, the American man rages, the Moroccan official shows surprise at the American’s rages, and we learn just a bit more about what’s happening to the businessman’s wife.
I suppose a more skillful cast could have made something more of Havis’s play, but not much more. This play is dramatic proof of something one of my computer-literate friends is fond of saying: garbage in, garbage out.
