Erin Courtney

Ann and Mary Ann are married. They are both neuroscientists and they both witnessed deeply traumatic events when they were young. Now, in the carefully ordered worlds of their marriage and laboratory—which is linked like the two lobes of the brain—Ann and Mary Ann care for, protect, and reflect one another. But when Ann begins to study Fran, a tile artist who is unable to recognize her husband after he commits an unthinkably violent act, Ann and Mary Ann must reckon with what it really means to see and be present to another person. Ann, Fran, Mary Ann is a deeply reflective, reflecting, refracting play about trauma, God, patterns, and the way they live in our bodies, our minds, and acts of love.

Bringing together some of the innovative, thought-provoking, and daring new works from New York's downtown theater scene, The Downtown Anthology offers a rich collection of plays from both up-and-coming and established playwrights. Includes: A Map of Virtue by Erin Courtney; We Are Proud To Present A Presentation About The Herero Of Namibia, Formerly Known As Southwest Africa, From The German S dwestafrika, Between The Years 1884-1915 by Jackie Sibblies Drury; Trevor by Nick Jones; The Lily's Revenge by Taylor Mac; Alice in Slasherland by Qui Nguyen; Phoebe in Winter by Jen Silverman. Trevor: "Hugely entertaining tragicomedy... the genius of Jones's] play is how he has so cleverly humanized both characters." - Chicago Sun Times The Lily's Revenge: "...offers so many incidental pleasures that theatrical time - always a curiously malleable element - seems to contract." - New York Times A Map of Virtue: "With a Hitchcockian sensibility, Courtney] makes psychodrama out of the mystery of what keeps people together even as imaginations and egos push them apart. Like a souvenir from a fleeting dream, this play will pass over you painlessly, and then it will linger." - Backstage

This volume collects two plays by Erin Courtney, A Map of Virtue and Black Cat Lost. The Obie Award--winning Map is a symmetrical play: part interview, part comedy, part horror story. Courtney's plays unfold in a delicate dance of pattern and narration; they ring out their images and meanings as a sequence of bells: complicating, harmonizing, and remapping their senses as they run their idiosyncratic course.