Learning Curve is an immersive performance that places you within the walls of a Chicago public high school and in the shoes of its students. With each step, you’ll experience the real-life triumphs and struggles of students, teachers and parents during the years that hopefully lead to a high school diploma.

Albany Park Theater Projects is a multiethnic, youth theater ensemble that inspires people to envision a more just and beautiful world. We are dedicated to art, to youth, and a vision of social justice.

We make our home in one of the three most ethnically diverse neighborhoods in the entire country, where we create original theater based on the life experiences of people whose stories might otherwise go untold: urban teens, immigrants, and working-class Americans. The art we make enriches the cultural vitality and quality of life in our neighborhood and throughout Chicago.

We cultivate a community where teens engage critically and creatively with the world as artists, thereby embarking on purposeful lives as adventurous dreamers and accomplished achievers. Teens emerge from APTP as young leaders with the vision and capacity for a lifetime of personal success and community engagement.

At APTP, people directly impacted by sociopolitical issues create original plays that humanize those issues with intellectual rigor, fervent humanity, and vibrant imagination. When we believe passionately in an issue, we also take to the streets to fight for change. The justice-minded youth leaders who emerge from APTP have a ripple effect that extends into schools, colleges, communities, and institutions well beyond our corner of Chicago.

To see an APTP play is to go on a journey deep into a world that you may have never visited before, a world you might not otherwise experience, guided on your journey by someone who lives in and knows that world intimately. We are storytellers, and we’ve filled our online home with the stories of our efforts on and off stage. We invite you to spend some time with these stories, and we hope you’ll revisit often.