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THE PERSIANS
AESCHYLUS / ROBERT AULETTA
The world’s very first surviving play returns with startling urgency directed by Josh Pohja (Henry V, Antigone, An Enemy of the People, My Name is Rachel Corrie, All Is Calm: The Christmas Truce of 1914). In 472 BCE, the Greeks gathered expecting triumph—but instead Aeschylus delivered something radically human: a tragedy told from the viewpoint of their sworn enemy, the Persians. It wasn’t just theatre. It was a political act of staggering courage, an invitation to see the “other” not as a monster, but as a mirror.
In this modern adaptation, Robert Auletta relocates the story to Iraq during the first Gulf War, asking American audiences to confront the human cost of conflict and to question inherited narratives of enemy and triumph. The result is a haunting, urgent, and deeply human examination of power, loss, and responsibility.
Tickets available now:
https://tinyurl.com/2kjxxdmu
DOCTOR FAUSTUS LIGHTS THE LIGHTS
by Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights detonates onstage like a ritual of language and light with her signature fierce, musical text tunneling straight into the fevered question of what it means to trade one’s soul for mastery. This is Stein at her most hypnotic: words looping, flaring, refracting like prisms, pulling the audience into a trance where meaning is felt in the body before it’s understood by the mind. This production fuses spoken-word operetta, spectacle, and visionary staging into an experience that reminds audiences why theatre exists at all: to shock the senses awake, to lift us into wonder, to make us feel thrillingly, urgently alive.
In a season built on reinvention and imagination, Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights stands as a beacon; seductive, electric, and impossible to look away from.
UNCLE VANYA
by Anton Chekhov
Wisconsin Classic Stage proudly inaugurates its ambitious Wisconsin Chekhov Project, a four-year journey through Anton Chekhov’s greatest works—Uncle Vanya, The Seagull, Three Sisters, and culminating in a site-specific Cherry Orchard performed in an actual Door County cherry orchard. This sweeping project reimagines Chekhov as a living conversation with the heart, humor, and contradictions of Wisconsin itself.
We begin with Uncle Vanya, Chekhov’s tragicomic masterpiece of longing, lost years, blistering desire, and the fragile hopes we cling to in rural life. This production relocates the play to Wisconsin farm country, where the rhythms of weather, land, and long-haul commitment echo the play’s deepest truths. Here, the stifling estate becomes a century-old Wisconsin farmhouse; wasted potential feels at home in the quiet ache of Midwestern loyalty. This is Chekhov grown in Wisconsin soil.
