The First Grade

This is the World Premiere of lauded Chicago playwright Joel Drake Johnson’s The First Grade. Exploring with great humor and passion the price one pays for being a totally engaged member of the human race, this World Premiere, which originated as one of Aurora Theatre Company’s Global Age Project winners last season, follows the sometimes hilarious, sometimes frightening journey of a woman whose attempts to save her physical therapist from harm leads her into a chaos that includes a class of first graders, her depressed daughter, her Ritalin addicted grandson, and an ex-husband with whom she still shares a home. Aurora Theatre Company Artistic Director Tom Ross directs this new play from Johnson, whom The Chicago Reader declared "balances gallows humor with acute insight and compassion. He creates characters so real you wonder what will happen to them after the final blackout."