A Wisconsin Classic Stage Study Guide

Doctor Faustus
Lights the
Lights

by Gertrude Stein
Oct 30 – Nov 8, 2026 Directed, Designed & Illuminated by Cole Castine Composed by Lincoln Donner
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Before the lights come up

In 1938, a sixty-four-year-old American poet sat down in the French countryside to write an opera libretto about a man who trades his soul for electricity. What came out of that afternoon is one of the strangest, funniest, and most quietly prophetic plays of the twentieth century. Wisconsin Classic Stage's production, running October 30 through November 8, 2026, invites you to meet it fully on its own terms: repetitive, playful, unnervingly modern, and lit, quite literally, from within.

This guide moves the way the play does, in scenes rather than chapters, circling a handful of ideas until they start to glow. Read it front to back, or drop in wherever your curiosity pulls you first. The gold current running down the left margin is your thread through it, sparking a little as it travels.

"Why should a sequence of words be anything but a pleasure?"— Gertrude Stein
Scene — Who She Was

Gertrude Stein

The Pittsburgh-born daughter of a streetcar magnate who quietly built the scaffolding of modernism.

Gertrude Stein, formal portrait, later in life, wearing a jeweled brooch.
Gertrude Stein, in her later Paris years.

Gertrude Stein was born in 1874 outside Pittsburgh and grew up in Oakland, California, a city she later declared had "no there there." She studied psychology at Radcliffe under William James, took the observational rigor of that training straight into medical school at Johns Hopkins, and left before finishing her degree with something far more useful to her than a diploma: a scientist's patience for watching how a mind actually behaves in real time. In 1903 she boarded a ship for Paris and, for all practical purposes, never came back.

At 27 rue de Fleurus, the apartment she shared first with her brother Leo and later with her lifelong partner Alice B. Toklas, Stein assembled one of the most consequential living rooms in the history of art. The walls carried early Picassos and Matisses long before either painter was famous enough to matter to anyone else; the Saturday evenings gathered Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Pound, and the whole restless generation she herself named "lost." She was a collector with an eye years ahead of the market, a connector who introduced painters to poets and poets to publishers, and a working writer who published relentlessly experimental prose for three decades in near-total obscurity. It took The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), a memoir she wrote in her partner's voice as a kind of extended literary joke, to finally make her briefly, reluctantly famous.

Born
Feb 3, 1874, Allegheny, Pennsylvania
Formed in
Oakland, CA · Radcliffe College · Johns Hopkins
Based in
27 rue de Fleurus, Paris, from 1903
Circle
Picasso, Matisse, Hemingway, Alice B. Toklas
Died
Jul 27, 1946, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France
Scene — How She Wrote

A rose is a rose is a rose

Stein wasn't interested in telling you a story. She wanted to hand you the sensation of something happening, live, over and over.

Stein called her method the "continuous present," a phrase for writing that refuses to let a moment harden into the settled past tense of ordinary narration. Instead of describing an event once and moving briskly on, she circles it, restates it with small shifting variations, and lets meaning build up slowly through repetition instead of plot. On the page it can look, at first glance, like a glitch or a stutter. Read aloud, it starts to behave more like breath, or weather, or a piece of music built entirely on a returning phrase that keeps finding new light to stand in.

Gertrude Stein seated, arms folded, photographed in a velvet jacket.
Stein at work, in the years when her sentences were teaching a generation of writers to hear language differently.

This wasn't a stylistic tic. Stein trained as a psychologist before she ever called herself a writer, and she treated language the way a researcher treats raw data: isolate the smallest unit, repeat the experiment, watch closely for what changes. She once described wanting her sentences to carry "a continuous present and a using of everything and a beginning again," a phrase that reads almost like a stage direction written thirty years early for Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, a play that loops back through its own opening scenes until the audience starts to feel, physically, what it costs a man to be trapped inside his own invention.

STAGE NOTE. In performance, Stein's repetitions are never mistakes to smooth over or apologize for. Actors are asked to locate a fresh reason to say the same line each time, which turns out to be exactly what a person does when they are quietly arguing with themselves.
Scene — The Man Who Sold the Dark

Four hundred years of Faust

Every generation seems to conjure the devil it needs. Stein's just happened to run on current.

The legend starts with a real man: Johann, or more likely Georg, Faust, a German physician, alchemist, and shameless self-promoter who wandered the German states between roughly 1480 and 1540, trailing rumors of sorcery through every town he passed. Within a few decades, his actual biography had curdled into folklore: the story of a scholar so hungry for forbidden knowledge that he bargains his soul away simply to obtain it.

Christopher Marlowe gave the legend its first great English shape around 1592 in The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, a brimstone-and-thunder morality play soaked in ambition and damnation. Two centuries later, Goethe made Faust the great project of his career, publishing Part One in 1808 and circling back to the story for the rest of his life, slowly transforming Faust from a doomed sinner into something closer to a tragic hero, driven forward by pure human striving.

Faust conjuring spirits, from an 1840 illustrated edition of Goethe's Faust Part One.
"Faust Conjures Up the Spirits," c. 1840, an illustration from a nineteenth-century edition of Goethe's Faust, Part One (1808), after a painting by Carl Christian Vogel von Vogelstein. This is the moment just before the pact, Faust reaching past the edge of what he's permitted to know.

By the time Stein arrived at the story in 1938, Faust had already lived several lives: sinner, striver, symbol of a German soul standing at the edge of catastrophe. Stein gave him a stranger fate still. Her Faustus has already gotten what he wanted, already stands inside the knowledge he once craved, and finds it has left him hollowed out, bored, and quietly terrified of what he's done.

Scene — Stein's Faustus

What actually happens

A room you keep re-entering, the lights burning a little brighter and a little more mercilessly each time.

We never see the deal get made. Stein opens the play well after the pact is signed: Doctor Faustus already stands in his room, electric light blazing behind him, already sick of the thing he sacrificed everything to build. He sold his soul to Mephisto for the power to invent electric light, and light, once invented, turned out to illuminate almost nothing worth actually seeing.

A boy and a dog drift in and out of his study, endlessly, cheerfully repeating "thank you," and Faustus cannot shake them loose no matter how hard he tries. Word reaches him of a woman in the forest, Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel, a single character carrying two doubled names as though the whole idea of womanhood refused to be compressed into just one, who has been bitten by a viper. Faustus heals her, almost against his own will. It is the single unambiguously good act he performs in the entire play, and it costs him nothing he had not already surrendered.

Tormented by the bargain he can't undo, Faustus tries to engineer his own damnation, arranging for the same viper to kill the boy and the dog, hoping fresh sin will finally earn him the hell he believes he's owed. When he tries to pull Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel down into that hell alongside him, she slips free instead, rescued by a man arriving from over the seas. Faustus is left precisely where he began: brilliantly lit, and completely alone.

Doctor Faustus
The man who invented electric light in exchange for his soul, and discovered far too late that he missed the dark.
Mephisto
The devil who came to collect. Insists throughout that he never lies, he only deceives, a distinction he considers extremely important.
Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel
A single woman carrying a doubled name, assembled from the great heroines of literature. Wounded by a viper, healed by Faustus, and, in the end, the one character in the play who gets to choose her own fate.
The Boy and the Dog
Two figures who mostly just say "thank you," on repeat, refusing to leave. A stubborn innocence Faustus can't tolerate and can't quite bring himself to destroy without paying a price.
The Viper
Half accident, half instrument. The same creature that wounds Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel later becomes the weapon Faustus turns against the boy and the dog.
The Man From Over the Seas
A late-arriving outsider who offers Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel an escape route from the play's closed, humming electric loop.
Scene — The Question at the Center

"You can see just as well without it."

Stein's quietest line carries the entire weight of the play.

Faustus sold his soul for light. The play's persistent, dry running joke is that the light he purchased turns out to be worse than useless: glaring, sterile, and strangely incapable of showing anyone anything they actually needed to see. Underneath the vaudeville repetition sits a real, quiet grief, mourning a world that traded darkness, mystery, and the slow natural rhythm of day sliding into night for something faster, brighter, and hollow all the way through.

Stein wrote this in 1938, watching a Europe rushing headlong toward a catastrophic version of modernity, toward mechanized war, toward an unquestioned faith that progress and invention were automatically good simply by existing. Faustus doesn't play as a villain in the old, thundering Marlowe register. He plays as something far more recognizable: a man who got precisely what he asked for and now can't figure out how to stop wanting it. The play never claims electricity is evil. It asks, gently and repeatedly, what got left behind in the rush to switch it on, and whether a single person paused, even once, to check whether the dark had been quietly doing something useful all along.

The Invention Faustus Bought
1879
Edison's Menlo Park lab perfects a carbonized filament that glows steadily for well over a thousand hours.
1882
The Pearl Street Station switches on, powering lower Manhattan as the first commercial electric grid.
1938
The year Stein writes Faustus, electric light has finished its journey from marvel to furniture.
1992
Robert Wilson stages the play in Berlin under banks of bare, humming, unglamorous bulbs.
FOR DISCUSSION. Where in your own life has a genuine improvement ended up costing more than it delivered? What would it actually mean to tell the difference between light and illumination?
Scene — Lighting It, First

The world premiere, 1992

Stein's text sat unstaged as opera for more than fifty years, waiting for a director whose entire vocabulary was light.

Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights was written as an opera libretto, but Stein never lived to see it fully realized as one. That premiere finally arrived on April 15, 1992, at the Hebbel Theater in Berlin, in a production directed and designed by Robert Wilson, with a score by Hans-Peter Kuhn, performed in English. Few directors could have been better matched to the material. Wilson's whole career has been built on treating stage light as an actor in its own right, on movement slowed almost to stillness, and on text stripped down until its underlying music finally shows through.

Scene from Robert Wilson's 1992 production of Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, Hebbel Theater, Berlin.
Robert Wilson's 1992 world-premiere production of Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, Hebbel Theater, Berlin. Photo: Gerhard Kassner.

Stein's Faustus turned out to be a role Wilson kept returning to across an entire career. In 1989 he had already directed Giacomo Manzoni's opera Doctor Faustus, based on Thomas Mann's novel, at Milan's La Scala. In 2008 he staged Gounod's Faust for the Polish National Opera in Warsaw. In 2015 he directed the original source text itself, Goethe's Faust, both parts, at the Berliner Ensemble. Four Fausts across four decades, and fittingly, the one story Wilson never seemed able to leave alone was a story about a man who can't stop returning to his own invention.

Scene — The Ones Who Refused the Rules

Women of the avant-garde

Every theatrical rule exists only because someone, at some point, agreed to follow it. These are some of the artists who quietly declined.

Stein wrote seventy-seven plays between 1913 and 1946, almost none of them staged during her lifetime, because she treated the accepted grammar of theater, plot, character psychology, linear time, a passive audience sitting quietly in the dark, as a set of choices rather than a set of laws. She belongs to a wider lineage of women who spent the century testing exactly how much of that grammar could be rewritten.

Gertrude Stein
Radically reinvented language, repetition, structure, and the very texture of theatrical time.
Isadora Duncan
A revolutionary movement artist whose free, unballeted dance permanently reshaped what performance was allowed to look like.
Helena Modrzejewska
A titan of the Polish stage, part of a tradition of Polish actresses, alongside Agnieszka Truskolaska and Leontyna Halpertowa, who treated performance itself as the true site of innovation.
Irena Solska
Ran an experimental stage built inside a Warsaw boiler room, staging plays stripped of scenery, ramp, and curtain, convinced a performance could enchant through the power of thought alone.
Anna Sokolow
A politically and theatrically radical choreographer who brought confrontation and social urgency directly into modern dance.
Pina Bausch
Fused dance and theater into Tanztheater, built from raw emotional gesture rather than counted steps.
Ariane Mnouchkine
Founder of Théâtre du Soleil, working through ensemble creation, ritual, international theatrical traditions, and enormous visual scale.
Elizabeth LeCompte
Founder of The Wooster Group, one of the defining forces of American avant-garde theater, whose own House/Lights is built directly out of Stein's Faustus text.

Trace the century's rebellions in a single line and it might run something like this:

Dada→ Surrealism→ Expressionism→ Futurism→ Theatre of Cruelty→ Epic Theatre→ Theatre of the Absurd→ Poor Theatre→ Happenings→ Performance Art→ Environmental Theatre→ Devised Theatre

What did each movement rebel against?

That question is probably the most useful way into the whole avant-garde, treating it as a chain of refusals rather than a list of styles. It leads straight to the question sitting underneath all of it, the one Stein's Faustus is still quietly asking a century later.

What are the rules of theatre everyone has agreed to follow, and what happens when an artist simply stops following them?

Scene — Our Production

Wisconsin Classic Stage lights the lights

A bold re-invention of Stein's landmark, staged in a former sanctuary on Wisconsin Avenue.

Wisconsin Classic Stage stages Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights October 30 through November 8, 2026: electricity, opera, spoken word, and poetry compressed, Stein-style, into one single, overflowing day. Everything. Nothing.

Wisconsin Classic Stage poster for Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, October 30 through November 8, 2026.
Written by
Gertrude Stein
Directed, Designed & Illuminated by
Cole Castine
Composed by
Lincoln Donner
Performances
Oct 30 – Nov 8, 2026

The production leans fully into what makes Stein's text so hard to file into a single category, treating it at once as opera, as spoken-word poetry, and as ritual, all inside the same charged, high-impact theatricalism that dispels the myth of theatrical realism WCS builds every production around.

Dates
Friday, October 30 – Sunday, November 8, 2026
Time
8pm Fridays · 8pm & 10pm Saturdays · 8pm Sundays
Venue
Calvary Presbyterian Church · 935 W. Wisconsin Avenue, Milwaukee, WI 53207
Runtime
Approx. 1 hour, performed without intermission
Accessibility
Reserved seating is recommended for patrons who require accessible seating; the standing-room section is not accessible. Continuous “perpetual light” staging is used throughout, with no blackout. Call 414.375.5127 in advance for assistance.
Age Guidance
Recommended for audiences ages 13 and older. Children under 13 will not be admitted.
Playwright
Gertrude Stein
Director
Cole Castine
Composer
Lincoln Donner
Cast
TBA
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