THE FAIRIES ARE THIRSTY Denise Boucher. Vancouver, Talonbooks, c!982. 67pp, paper, $4.95. ISBN 0-88922-200-2. Post-Secondary. Reviewed by donalee Moulton-Barrett. Volume 11 Number 4. 1983 July. Denise Boucher is obsessed with man's creation of the Virgin Mary, and this obsession fills The Fairies Are Thirsty. In this world, you are either a whore or a virgin, believes Boucher, and both are terms created and defined-and rein-forced-by men. Boucher takes these opposites and makes them main characters in her play: Madeleine is an alcoholic hooker; the Virgin Mary a grey statue. Then there's Marie, the third major force in the play. She's a housewife and mother, neither virgin, nor prostitute—or both. The Fairies Are Thirsty is a simple yet dramatic attempt to explain the powerful male chains that have bound women throughout history and just as simply and dramatically show how women can and must break the steel that traps them. Most of the play revolves around the three women as they detail their historic plight with each other, and with the audience. Much of what they have to say is melodramatic and clichéd. Much isn't. Boucher has the ability to be strikingly poignant and penetrating. Lines like these, for example:          "I feel like bread dough that doesn't want to rise.          And yet, it's spring. But I've no spring left in me.          The glories of motherhood don't keep me in the peak          of form, that's for sure. Maybe I'm not normal. Is it          always going to be like this?"          "We, the mothers, the pro-sti-tutes, the saints. We are          po-li-ti-cal pri-so-ners. Like women who have killed          their husbands."          "And all us women together, all us women, we're all cops.          We're the guardians of the moral order of their society.          What a hell of a job." What a hell of a play! donalee Moulton-Barrett, Halifax, NS.