The prose at the improvised, liquor-fueled wake is lean, clean and fine. And though it is spoken in the style of the recently departed — a big man (call him Papa) who cast a shadow over everyone around him — it is not he, for once, who is the subject.

“When I think of her, I think of the truth,” says a character in Jaclyn Backhaus’s “Wives,” the feverish feminist comedy that opened on Monday night at Playwrights Horizons, “and the quest for what was true and how she always had it there at her side and it made me want to eat the worms.”

Thus does Hadley Richardson , the first wife of Ernest Hemingway, imagine how her former husband might have described her. Two other Mrs. Hemingways — his widow, Mary Welsh, and the journalist Martha Gellhorn — are there to provide their own self-eulogies in the voice of the author of “The Sun Also Rises.”

They’re having a helluva time. And just wait till that giant swordfish that was mounted on Papa’s wall is brought out to join in the drinking games. She (for surely this piscine trophy is also female) is doused in rum and set on fire, suggesting that revenge is a dish best served hot and soused.