"A Map of Virtue," by Erin Courtney, From 13P Company 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. Sure, a smart producer could make the narrative clearer and eliminate precious elements like the bird statue turned narrator. But there is a price to cutting what appears unnecessary or eccentric, and in this case, it would be too high. Luckily, "Map" was produced by 13P, a company of playwrights founded expressly to avoid this fate. Its slogan is blunt: "We don't develop plays. We do them.  And so they have. The result is not a smooth, seamless work, but a tense, oddly paced, tonally inconsistent one. It's exactly what it should be. The story begins with a bird attack out of Hitchcock that is the backdrop for the first of several charged meetings between two strangers, Sarah (Maria Striar) and Mark (Jon Norman Schneider). Although they don't talk so much as notice each other, their unspoken glances are remembered when they cross paths later. This curious yet strangely familiar relationship (the stuff of Missed Connections on Craigslist) is the prelude to a horrifying ordeal in the woods experienced by Mark, Sarah and her husband, Nate (Alex Draper). It's a haunting, romantic story with a mystery at its center. The bird narrator, played with simplicity and grace by Birgit Huppuch, introduces scenes by announcing a virtue, like curiosity. Despite this formal neatness, the storytelling is sly, pleasingly unpredictable. And the director Ken Rus Schmoll brings the same sensitivity to the production that he did to Anne Washburn's play "The Internationalist," smartly letting the audience make the thematic and emotional links that are buried in the script. The big plot twist is melodramatic, like something from one of those horror movies in which terrible things happen to urban dwellers when they go to rural places. This extreme turn of events, however, is anticipated in the opening scene and is ultimately less important than the way it exposes the relationships in the play. The performers are uniformly understated and believable: Mr. Draper is particularly deft in a small role. And in an evocatively simple design, Daniel Kluger's meticulously eerie sound stands out. In the end, "A Map of Virtue" is the mirror image of the way it's told. Just as a tidy structure frames some serious quirks, an outrageous episode becomes a window into a resonant tale of loss, lives not lived and the unlikely moments that hold relationships together.