The reason I don't go to more plays is that most of the plays offered in my area seem dumb to me: obvious, corny, pandering to popular trends—with all due respect for differences in taste. The only works with depth are the old classics, Death of a Salesman, and all that, and I've seen all that stuff. Beautiful as the works of Arthur Miller and Eugene O'Neill may be, they are relics of another era.
How would you go about writing a thoroughly modern play? Artists of the early 20th century had a similar problem. Picasso admired Renoir and collected one of his works, but those hazy nudes and dappled outdoor parties just weren't relevant in an era of airplanes and relativity and devastating political conflicts. It's not just that the subjects were old-hat, the whole style of painting from the early Renaissance forward seemed too tame, too controlled, too idealized for the explosive modern era.
Picasso and the other young artists of the early 1900s were driven to deconstruct the basic idea of painting. Artists began to ask, what else can art do? What else can you do with paint and canvas other than depict the conventional pseudo-photograhic reality that was the standard? The most obvious example is the development of Cubism, which aimed to express in paint the fact that "reality" depends on your point of view, by showing various views of a figure or object at the same time. Cubism had many more facets, but it's a clear-cut example of the way artists analyzed every aspect of art—colors, shapes, application of paint, symbolism, etc.—over the next several decades. Eventually they came to the very concept behind a work of art, and developed a type of art known as Conceptualism, in which the execution of the work was less important than the original concept, and for which the basic intention is to blow your mind.
This is where A Map of Virtue comes in. The playwright, Erin Courtney, started as an artist herself, and like Picasso, she has deconstructed theater itself. What else can you do with actors and a stage and props and all the paraphernalia of theater other than make some half-baked depiction of reality? The form she has created is brand new, at least in my experience. Poetic recitations are mixed with musical interludes, dramatic scenes, and direct address to the audience. Everything is held together by a riveting sound design.
Another innovation that Erin brings to theater is personal vision. Traditionally, theater is based on shared perceptions by the community, while painting is a mode of personal expression. To me it seems that Erin is expressing ideas that are significant in her life, saying the things that need to be said for her artistic fulfillment.
The most confusing thing about the play is the title. There is no Map of Virtue, and these characters definitely need one. To compound the confusion, there appears to be a map, or at least an outline, of virtues—curiosity, honesty, intuition, etc.—which underpins the action. A talking bird statue announces them portentously, but you wait in vain to see them exemplified on stage. On the contrary, the characters haven't got a clue. The basic nightmare in this play is that the characters have no direction: no values, no intentions. They do random things for unknown reasons, and because of that, they are subject to the whims of fate, which predictably have dangerous effects.
The one virtue you can observe in this play is intuition. Three of the characters are kidnapped and experience a few terrifying nights in the custody of two armed and unpredictable captors. They are rescued by Victor, boyfriend of one of the characters, because his intuition told him his friend was in trouble. But where did that intuition come from? Didn't it come from love? Is love finally the map of virtue?
If you go to the theater to have your old assumptions confirmed, don't bother with Erin Courtney's A Map of Virtue. You're not going to leave the theater saying, "Wow." You're going to be saying, "Huh?" And then you're going to find yourself thinking and thinking. If you'd like to blast away the cobwebs and come into the 21st century of theatrical possibilities, see this play. Then see it again.
Unfortunately, the production I saw of this play, by Barker Room Rep in Los Angeles has almost finished its run. As I write, there are only 3 more performances.
Barker Room Rep is a new theater company to Los Angeles, founded by Mark Sitko, who first established himself in Brooklyn, where they actually know what theater is about. Like Erin, Mark wants to shake the ingredients of theater up and pour out something new and innovative. What would be totally new in theater? Well, work by women for one thing. And what about all the other writers who have been marginalized by a stodgy theatrical industry? Mark's dream is to build an inclusive theater community by dealing with contemporary concerns in an innovative manner. We could use it.
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