LESSON PLAN: This week, Amphibian Stage Productions stages the regional debut of Billy Aronson’s The First Day of School. The play follows a group of parents who have some adventures of their own after dropping the kids off. To get you up to speed, Theater Jones interviewed Aronson, who’s not only written plays but also books and TV scripts. Meanwhile, the This Week in the Arts podcast talks with Marshall York and Molly Lloyd from Amphibian about acting in the play. The show opened last night, and Lawson Taitte was on the scene. And, well, he didn’t think there was quite enough farce in this farce. “Each act has one, and one only, surprise of the sort that propels real farces forward,” he writes in his dallasnews.com review. “If farces were fancy cars, The First Day of School would be a group of unicycles hitched together by a rope.”

ENTER THE CHAMBER: Also debuting last night in the 817 was the Mimir Chamber Music Festival. For the uninitiated, guest artists from some of the country’s top orchestras come in to teach master classes at TCU by day and then perform in chamber music ensembles by night. “The program was a mix of mainstream and off-the-beaten-path, and the performances sounded as if honed over years of playing together,” Scott Cantrell writes in his dallasnews.com review. ” Chris Shull of dfw.com was also in attendance, and like Cantrell, he was mostly impressed.

IT’S FUNNY BECAUSE IT’S TRUE: What does the following video have to do with the local arts scene? Absolutely nothing. But I pass it along (via Jerome) because it’s just So. Dang. Funny. To say much about it would be to say too much. But if you’ve ever thought about why certain types of movies always get nominated for Oscars, you’ll enjoy this one.