The First Grade
About This Show:
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...
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AURORA THEATRE
2081 Addison StreetBerkeley,CA,94704
Begins: 01/22/2010
Ends: 02/28/2010
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Buzz about this show
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02/18/2010
You can never go wrong with Aurora Theatre. First Grade is a top-notch production and kudos to Julia Brothers as the teacher. Impressive! -
02/15/2010Theater review: 'The First Grade' - The turn-on-a-dime shift so deftly executed by Brothers and Rebecca Schweitzer, as her daughter Angie, signals the structure and impact of Joel Drake Johnson's "The First Grade," a world premiere that opened Thursday at Aurora Theatre. The anchor production in the Aurora's annual Global Age Project (GAP), "First Grade" is an incisive comedy of today's manners that veers into tense dramatic standoff before settling into a more traditional domestic-comedy resolution. [Read More]
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02/15/2010
THE FIRST GRADE
Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle
The Aurora Theatre Company of Berkeley is presently staging the delightfully dark, but redemptive, comedy THE FIRST GRADE by Joel Drake Johnson.
Anyone who has ever known an Elementary School Teacher with twenty plus years in the cookie crumb trenches knows how such a vet is.
Being accustomed to speaking with diminutive persons equipped naturally with audio processing problems and attention deficit disorders, teachers tend to over articulate even the briefest, least abstract sentence.
Secondly, because Elementary School children have yet to become adept at masking their real selves, Elementary Teachers see everyone as if they were as simple, linear and as transparent as a first grader.
Does seeing the world through the lens of a First Grade Teacher provide one with a better handle on life or greater insights?
That’s the question writer Joel Johnson and direct Tom Ross vividly answer on the Aurora Stage.
Julia Brothers, as the First Grade Teacher, provides the audience with a character that everyone can appreciate for her honesty, intelligence and expectations and yet ironically no one would want her as a spouse or as a parent: she demands too much objectivity from the people around her and, like a First Grade Teacher, is unwilling to tolerate any forms of self indulgence or monkey business.
Warren David Keith, as the defeated retreating husband: Nat, brilliantly portrays a husband that the audience can universally sympathize with; after all, how does a man live with a woman who makes cookies and then hides them so that no one else can eat them; and who brooks no intimation of human weakness?
Nat, unable to get a divorce fast enough, does what most men would do: adapt: he escapes to a quiet corner of the house, buys scotch in two-liter bottles and sneaks in a passionate mistress.
As the expression goes, vengeance is best served cold or on a queen size mattress.
Were it not for his penchant for ice in his scotch, he could side step Frau Elementary Teacher all together.
Rebecca Schweitzer, as the dysfunctional daughter, gives an equally compelling performance.
What’s a daughter to do when she has an overbearing First Grade Teacher as a mother?
Shut down, search for sensual pleasure and oral satisfaction in forbidden cookies, sulk, give off tons of attitude like a squid gives off sepia, and curl convolutedly into the emotional fetal position.
The First Grade Teacher has pretty much destroyed all life at ground zero until a more wretched character: Mora, played superbly by Tina Sanchez dives into the family brew.
THE FIRST GRADE is indisputably a great play: it’s entertaining, elevating and enlightening.
Why? Because it’s a blend of irony and complexity: it’s about adroitness, rectitude and a sober approach to life run amuck and onto the rocks: scotch on the rocks to be specific.
If you are getting a whiff of toxicity in your life, or you just want an intelligent laugh, THE FIRST GRADE is your ticket.
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