Ann, Fran and Mary Ann
by Erin Courtney
“‘I am a scientist,’ declare two of the protagonists of the deliciously titled Ann, Fran, and Mary Ann. And Ann and Mary Ann are scientists, married to each other. Fran is a tile artist. Then there’s a third scientist girding this play. It is the writer Erin Courtney—a true scientist of poetics and drama—giving us life-force language, firm form, and rounded, clear edges to create the play as vessel, a vessel as magical and secure as a lab beaker which holds the shaky beauty of these three women and the moment in time when they cross paths. Erin puts questions of God, effects of trauma, distrust in our bodies, and brain science under her singular microscope and creates a page-turning play that feels utterly of this moment and then tethered to a kind of forever. ‘Listen to me,’ Ann and Mary Ann implore each other finally. Let’s listen to and through them because Erin chose to find these characters and this story—and because it’s like a fact that we should as often as possible listen and look to Erin Courtney as one of our guides to the feelings we hold inside and outside ourselves.” —Tina Satter
Erin Courtney
Playwright
Erin Courtney is an award winning, New York based playwright. Her play, A Map of Virtue, produced by 13P and directed by Ken Rus Schmoll, was awarded an Obie and described as "one of the most terrifying plays of the past decade” by Alexis Soloski in The New York Times. A Map of Virtue was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding New York Theater, and has had numerous productions across the country. Her play I Will Be Gone, directed by Kip Fagan, premiered at the Humana Festival, Actors Theater of Louisville in 2015. She is currently writing a new play, Ann, Fran, Mary Ann, which is a Playwrights Horizons commission.
She has written two operas with Elizabeth Swados: The Nomad and Kaspar Hauser. Both were commissioned and produced by The Flea Theater. The musical, The Tattooed Lady, which she is writing with composer and lyricist, Max Vernon, has been developed with support from The Rhinebeck Writer’s Retreat, The Kimmel Center, and Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater. Her other plays, produced by Clubbed Thumb, include Alice The Magnet, directed by Pam MacKinnon, and Demon Baby, directed by Ken Rus Schmoll. She is an affiliated artist with Clubbed Thumb, a member of the Obie Award winning playwright's collective, 13P, as well as the co-founder of the Brooklyn Writers Space. Ms. Courtney was the program director and taught playwriting at the MFA program at Brooklyn. She earned her MFA in playwriting at Brooklyn College under the tutelage of Mac Wellman, and she earned her BA from Brown University where she studied with Paula Vogel. She has been a member of New Dramatists since 2012, a MacDowell Colony Fellow, a Core Writer at the Playwrights’ Center, and a member of The Working Farm at Space on Ryder Farm. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013. Ms. Courtney is core faculty in the MFA Program of Dramatic Writing at Northwestern University in the Radio/Television/Film department.