(CLEVELAND, OHIO – June 2014). convergence-continuum continues its 2014 Season with the regional premiere of Erin Courtney’s 2012 Obie Award-winning play A Map of Virtue. Part interview, part comedy, part middle-of-the-night ordeal, A Map of Virtue is a perfectly symmetrically-structured play guided by a tiny bird statue.
An unlikely friendship develops between Mark and Sarah when he gives her a small bird statue during a chance encounter. Although inextricably linked, they remain strangers until they are forced, along with Sarah's husband Nate and Mark’s boyfriend Victor, to share a frightening weekend in a cabin deep in the woods that derails into a quiet, pitiless nightmare. The play is structured around a symmetrical arrangement of themes, organized around seven virtues which are announced by the narrator – the tiny statue of a meadowlark. Though it begins as a quirkily humorous rumination on chance and symmetry, Ms. Courtney's drama alters into a tense and enigmatic exploration of obsession, attachment, isolation and the murky middle of the night – when bad things sometimes happen.
A Map of Virtue is directed by convergence-continuum’s Artistic Director, Clyde Simon, and features company actors Lucy Bredeson-Smith, Robert Hawkes, Mike Majer, Jack Matuszewski and Eric Sever and newcomers to the Liminis stage Kat Bi and Logan Smith.
A Map of Virtue opens Friday, June 20 and runs at 8 pm, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays through July 12 at the Liminis, 2438 Scranton Rd., Cleveland, OH 44113 in the historic Tremont neighborhood. Tickets are $15 general admission, $12 for seniors and $10 for students. Reservations and information are available at convergence-continuum.org or 216-687-0074.
A Map of Virtue is the third and final play in convergence-continuum’s three-play series “The Menagerie Surreal,” which included Lobster Alice in March/April and Swimming in the Shallows in May. The series is supported in part by the residents of Cuyahoga County through a public grant from Cuyahoga Arts & Culture.
Clyde Simon co-founded convergence-continuum with Brian Breth in 2000, and since then he has continuously served as artistic director, principle director, mentor, actor and set designer. His efforts have created a tight-knit, freely collaborative company unique in northeast Ohio, where artists are encouraged to dare themselves, experiment with danger, live on the edge, and trust in the rescue that will surely come after the inevitable occasional fall. He inspires fierce devotion in his company members and, in those who have worked with convergence once or twice before, a keen desire to return.
Clyde has directed 38 of convergence-continuum's 57 productions as of the close of the 2013 season and has appeared in convergence-continuum's productions of QUILLS, EACH DAY DIES WITH SLEEP, TONE CLUSTERS, ICARUS, SPAWN OF THE PETROLSEXUALS, HOT 'N' THROBBING, A MURDER OF CROWS, ACT A LADY, FREAKSHOW, FINN IN THE UNDERWORLD, DARK RIDE, THE MUSEUM PLAY, THE BOYS IN THE BAND, THE HYACINTH MACAW, BASED ON A TOTALLY TRUE STORY, SELF DEFENSE, and LILIES.
Clyde obtained a BS in biology from Bowling Green State University, an MS in oceanography from the University of Hawaii, and an MFA in theatre from Kent State University. He acted and directed for a couple of decades in New York, Chicago, Honolulu, Indonesia, Philippines, and here in NE Ohio.
Seventeen years were spent in Indonesia (Jakarta Players), the Philippines (Repertory Philippines in Manila), Hawaii (Filipino Repertory Company), Chicago, and NYC (actor, director, literary manager for the Off-Off-Broadway Flea Theater). When he returned to Cleveland, before founding convergence, Clyde worked with Cleveland Public Theatre as literary manager and director of the New Plays Festival.
Clyde, a NE Ohio native, says that living immersed in other cultures (and doing lots of theatre there as well) has informed his perspective on our American culture, performance practices and humanity in general. Yet, extraordinary as all these experiences were--working with the Peace Corps teaching high school science and math in Sarawak (Malaysian Borneo), working as a shrimp farming technologist and consultant in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Costa Rica and India--there's no place like home.
Clyde's home in Tremont adjoins The Liminis Theatre in which the convergence-continuum company performs. He graciously allows the company the run of his house, which opens directly into the theatre, and he has adapted much of his living space to be used in this way. It is a space with few distinct boundaries: entirely appropriate.
The Playwright: Erin Courtney
In addition to A Map of Virtue, Ms. Courtney's plays include, among others, Honey Drop, Black Cat Lost, Alice the Magnet, Quiver and Twitch, Mother’s Couch and Demon Baby. In 2013 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work has been produced and developed in New York City by Clubbed Thumb, The Flea (including Mother’s Couch, directed by Clyde Simon when he was a resident director there), New York Stage and Film, Adhesive Theater, Soho Rep, The Vineyard, and The Public. She has collaborated with Elizabeth Swados on the opera Kaspar Hauser and is starting work on a new musical with Ms. Swados on the life of Isabelle Eberhardt. She has been a resident at the MacDowell Colony, a recipient of a NYSCA grant and two MAP Fund grants from the Rockefeller Foundation. Demon Baby is published in two anthologies; New Downtown Now, edited by Mac Wellman and Young Jean Lee and published by University of Minnesota Press, and Funny, Strange, Provocative: Seven Plays by Clubbed Thumb edited by Maria Striar and Erin Detrick and published by Playscripts, Inc. A Map of Virtue and Black Cat Lost are published by 53rd State Press. She is an affiliated artist with Clubbed Thumb, a member of 13P, and a member of New Dramatists. She teaches in the MFA playwriting program at Brooklyn College and is a co-founder of Brooklyn Writers Space. She is a graduate of Mac Wellman’s MFA program at Brooklyn College (2003), and received a BA from Brown University (1990).
Playwright Sarah Ruhl, in her cover note for the 53rd State Press publication of A Map of Virtue wrote that “Erin Courtney reinvents language with each of her plays. Her voice is at once poetic (and therefore ancient) and absolutely contemporary. Her formal exploits are fearless and she is that ever-elusive thing – a writer of theater meant to be seen heard and read – and an original.”