Theater: Fourth Street Theatre / 83 E 4th St, New York, New York, 10003
Synopsis:
In this middle-of-the-night horror, a shared obsession leaves a group of friends stranded in the woods. A bird statue serves as your guide through this symmetrical story about the limits of our virtues and what we leave behind.
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February 17, 2012: Erin Courtney’s delicate gem, “A Map of Virtue,” is the kind of play that could be ruined in development, since its potentially disastrous affectations are also the source of its beauty.
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February 13, 2012: Erin Courtney’s A Map of Virtue, the penultimate offering of the 13P project, is a studiously odd bird: Formal structure is the wind beneath its wings. “I love symmetry, so I was drawn to her,” says Mark (Jon Norman Schneider) of his first encounter with Sarah (Clubbed Thumb’s Maria Striar), and Courtney is attracted to symmetry too; the play is a meticulous arrangement of themes, organized around seven virtues that are announced as such by the narrator, which is a tiny statue of a meadowlark played by Birgit Huppuch with the air of a canary that ate the cat.
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February 14, 2012: It is said that the people with the most symmetrical faces are those that we find the most attractive. If this is true, and let's suppose it is, there is something deeply satisfying about symmetry to us humans. We enjoy it on visual level of aesthetics, but for someone like me, who enjoys a complex art such as theater, I also appreciate thematic symmetry when I see/hear/feel it.
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February 15, 2012: When the narrator of “A Map of Virtue” turned out to be a bird statue, the play stopped working for me. Sadly, that was in the first few minutes.
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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.
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