First Floor Theater Announces 2021-22 Season

First Floor Theater has announced their ninth live-production season, featuring one world premiere and one Chicago premiere, along with a second round of The Blueprint Commission, it' new play development initiative.

"We're thrilled to welcome back audiences with some of the most electrifying, audacious and unabashedly queer work in Chicago," says Artistic Director Hutch Pimentel. "We spent our time away from the theatre reassessing our priorities and values and we're proud to reintroduce a more equitable, more vibrant First Floor Theater."

First Floor Theater's 2021-22 Season includes:

The Chicago Premiere of

BOTTICELLI IN THE FIRE

By Jordan Tannahill, Directed by FFT Artistic Director Hutch Pimentel

January 27 - March 5, 2022

Playboy Sandro Botticelli has it all: talent, fame, good looks. He also has the ear - and the wife - of Lorenzo de Medici, as well as the Renaissance's hottest young apprentice, Leonardo Da Vinci. But while at work on his breakthrough commission, 'The Birth of Venus,' Botticelli's devotion to pleasure and beauty is put to the ultimate test. As the plague sweeps through the city, the charismatic friar Savonarola starts to stoke the fires of dissent against the liberal elite. Botticelli finds the life he knows breaking terrifyingly apart, forcing him to choose between love and survival. Jordan Tannahill's hot-blooded queering of Renaissance Italy questions the value of art at the collapse of society.

The World Premiere of

THE SECRETARIES: A PARABLE

By FFT Company Member Omer Abbas Salem, Directed by Laura Alcalá Baker

May 5 - June 11, 2022

Berlin, 1944: four women in Aryan drag vie to be the Führer's personal secretary as he heads into a bunker with his girlfriend. As the Third Reich crumbles around them, mystery and secrets abound, causing tensions to escalate. Omer Abbas Salem's fearsome, outrageous and absurd new work examines complicity and the lies we tell ourselves as we mistake self-interest and supremacy for civic duty. This is Salem's first production as a playwright in Chicago.

Botticelli in the Fire and The Secretaries: A Parable will take place at The Den Theatre, 1331 N. Milwaukee Ave. in Chicago's Wicker Park neighborhood, where First Floor is a resident company.

THE BLUEPRINT COMMISSION

First Floor Theater will continue the Blueprint Commission program this season. The company will select two playwrights and develop their projects over the course of a year, culminating in public readings of the new plays beginning in the Summer of 2022. This vital work to help bring crucial voices to the stage will continue to be a part of First Floor's work for years to come. This project is made possible by a generous donation from Michael and Mona Heath, of the HeathFund. Thanks to their generous contribution, both projects will be afforded full developmental processes.

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