Maps For A War Tourist is a call to slow down and regroup. A meditation on how to tell stories, especially true ones, or contemporary ones; and an attempt to learn from the slow, stubborn tenacity of the tortoise. Sister Sylvester chose a difficult story to tell, maybe an impossible one, but they didn’t realize it until it was too late. It’s the story of an ideology that travels from the lower east side to the mountains of Iraq; a story that is political, but has also become personal; a story that is of an individual, but also of the complex geopolitics concerning USA and Turkey; a story whose context changes on an almost daily basis. Trying to navigate narrative, politics and emotion in the storm that is the world right now, they turned to the calmest, oldest, most unshakable creature they could think of – the tortoise.

Stripping away Sister Sylvester‘s trademark chaos, the show is conceived and directed by Kathryn Hamilton, and co-created by the ensemble of performers, which includes Cyrus Moshrefi, Kelsea Martin, Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, Ms. Hamilton; a pair of tortoises named Squat and Creon; and dramaturg Jeremy M. Barker.