A Map of Virtue: Erin Courtney's New Play Puts Too Many Birds on It
Tom Sellar
February 15, 2012: Erin Courtney is one of the few American playwrights willing to acknowledge and explore how supernatural currents can churn around our psychological lives. In Demon Baby (2004), her best-known drama, a sprightly gnome emerges from an unhappy woman's psyche and becomes at least as real as anything else in her world. A Map of Virtue, Courtney's new play produced by the writers' collective 13P, summons birds—flocks of them—as emblems of fate and self-evolution. We hear eerie, anarchic chirping in the blackouts, a woman representing a tiny feathered statuette (Birgit Huppuch) re-narrates scenes from the periphery, and a deranged kidnapper (Jesse Lenat) wears a beaked mask when preparing to torture his victims.
READ THE REVIEW