Learning Curve

"A wondrous, one-of-a-kind masterwork, the piece featured the unique alchemy of APTP’s extraordinarily skilled young performers and evoked life in a Chicago high school in ways that were so real yet so imaginative — so disturbing and so life-confirming — that you wanted to grab hold of every politician and school bureaucrat and say: Experience this show, and then do something." 

– The Chicago Sun-Times

Learning Curve welcomed audience members into Ellen Gates Starr High School, named after the pioneering educational and political reformer who cofounded a settlement house in Chicago in 1889. As they passed through a metal detector and veered into the school office, a security guard snapped photos for the required school IDs that would be worn around their necks for the next two hours.

The seeds for Learning Curve were sown in 2014 when I visited Albany Park Theater Project with three teaching artists to lead a week-long residency. The young performers approached the idea of immersive performance with thoughtful enthusiasm, as if they were waiting for the opportunity to step off the stage and invite the audience to experience their world. That world is high school.

Over the next two years, we collaborated with APTP’s teen ensemble and adult directors to craft a performance that would place each audience member into the shoes of a student, creating an immersive journey that began seated at a desk and embarked on a zigzag path between realistic and theatrically heightened environments all over the building.

Inspired by real-life stories, the performance offered an intimate look at the struggles and triumphs of being a student in a Chicago public high school. In a world designed to be reminiscent of their own experience as high school students, audience members faced the persistent and challenging issues that students, teachers, and administrators deal with today.

Full description and credits: thirdrailprojects.com