Name Allan Havis | Role Playwright | |
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Education Yale School of Drama (1980) Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, US & Canada Books American Political Plays, Cult Films: Taboo and Transgression, Haunting of Jim Crow, Albert the astronomer, Plays by Allan Havis - Two | ||
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Allan Havis is a playwright with pronounced political themes and probes on colliding cultures. His works range from minimal-language texts to ambiguous, ironic narratives that delineate the genesis, paradoxes, and seduction of evil. Several of his dramas involve Jewish identity, cultural alienation, and universal problems of racism. His literary influences come, in part, from August Strindberg[1] and Harold Pinter.[2]
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In addition to his plays, Havis wrote a novel for children, Albert the Astronomer (Harper & Row, 1979; ISBN 0-06-022242-5). He edited an anthology for University of Illinois Press, American Political Plays (2001; ISBN 0-252-07000-3). Nineteen Havis plays are published in editions by Broadway Play Publishing Inc., Theatre Communications Group, Penguin/Mentor, Smith & Kraus, Applause Books, and University of Illinois. His book Cult Films: Taboo and Transgression ( University Press of America, 2008; ISBN 0-7618-3967-4) covers ninety years of cinema. Southern Illinois University Press published his next edited anthology 2010, American Political Plays after 9/11. His first opera libretto, Lilith (music by Anthony Davis), had its world premiere concert recital at the Conrad Prebys Music Center, UC San Diego on December 4, 2009. The chamber opera, based on his play, highlights Adam's first wife of supernatural proportion and partly staged in a modern era. His second opera with Anthony Davis on a modern Lear archetype, Lear on the 2nd Floor, had a showcase presentation at Princeton's Lewis Center for the Arts in March 2012 and produced in March 2013 at Conrad Prebys Music Center, UC San Diego. Lilith was given a showcase presentation at the Qualcomm Institute, UC San Diego November 2015 and can be see on UCSD TV online.
Havis has an MFA from Yale Drama School and is on the UC San Diego theatre faculty. He has headed for many years the MFA playwriting program at University of California, San Diego, and served as Provost of Thurgood Marshall College, UC San Diego from 2006 until 2016. He has two children.