Wisconsin Classic Stage · Milwaukee

2026/27
Season

Three masterworks spanning twenty-five centuries. One company committed to the living pulse of classical theater.

The Season
· · ·

From the ruins of ancient Persia to a devil's bargain lit by electric light, to the quiet devastation of a Russian estate — this season Wisconsin Classic Stage presents works that refuse to stay in the past. These are plays that haunt, provoke, and illuminate what it means to be human.

The Productions · 2026–2027

The Persians
I

Aeschylus · Adapted by Robert Auletta

The Persians

April 24–26, 2026 · 8:00 pm · Calvary Presbyterian Church

The first anti-war play in recorded history — written by a soldier who fought in the very war he depicted.

Aeschylus gives voice not to the victors, but to the vanquished. Set in the Persian court as news of Xerxes' catastrophic defeat arrives, this is theater at its most elemental — grief, hubris, and the terrible cost of empire. Directed by Josh Pohja. Originally produced at the Salzburg Festival, Austria.

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Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights
II

Gertrude Stein · An Operetta

Doctor Faustus
Lights the Lights

November 2026

Stein takes the oldest bargain in literature and rewrites it as pure incantation.

Doctor Faustus has sold his soul for the power to illuminate the world. Now, bathed in cold electric light, he wonders what he has truly lost. Stein's radical operetta is part chant, part dream, part philosophical dare — a work that dismantles narrative itself in pursuit of something truer than story.

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Uncle Vanya
III

Anton Chekhov · A Tragicomedy

Uncle Vanya

March 2027

Chekhov's most devastating portrait of wasted lives — and somehow, his funniest.

On a crumbling Russian estate, Vanya and those around him circle in the slow agony of lives that did not become what they should have been. Love unreturned. Time running out. Chekhov gives us no resolution — only people, achingly real, reaching toward something just out of grasp.

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Theater that defies
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