Program
Wisconsin Classic Stage presents
Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights
ProgramAdvertising
Put your name in the light.
Milwaukee's dedicated classical repertory company is lighting up Gertrude Stein's radiant, riddling masterpiece inside the Big Red Church. Every patron receives a complimentary digital program. Your ad can be in it.
- Oct 30 – Nov 8, 2026
- Sanctuary Hall · Calvary Presbyterian
- Milwaukee Premiere
We are not making museum theatre. We are making theatre for audiences.
What we're building
Wisconsin Classic Stage is a company built on two convictions. First: the text comes first. Every line spoken so it lands, every idea clear enough to argue about on the walk home. Second: an audience deserves spectacle. Masks that glow, ink that spills across a stage, a parking lot that becomes a Norwegian parlor when the rain begins.
Clarity without spectacle is a lecture. Spectacle without clarity is a light show. We want both, in a room you can feel breathing.
Textual clarity
The great plays, spoken so an audience hears them fresh, as if they were written last night.
Spectacle
High-impact theatricalism: bold images, live bodies, and nothing dusty in the building.
The season so far
From the dead king's ghost
to the rain in Ibsen's parlor.
Two productions in, this is the company your ad joins. Watch it flow from The Persians into Ghosts, and on into the light of Faustus.
Next in the light
A soul traded for
infinite light.
Gertrude Stein wrote Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights in 1938: a bargain with the devil, a viper in the forest, a hunger for more light than any human eye can hold. In 2026 it reads like a headline about machines, and it asks the question we keep asking: is there a soul inside the light?
We are staging it as an event, not a recital. Twenty-five audience members sit on two sides of the church; fifty more stand and move through the space as the action travels the aisles. The score is monophonic choral music by composer Lincoln Donner, so simple that the audience is handed sheet music and sings along. There is a 27-foot viper. There is no blackout and no intermission, only perpetual light for about an hour and ten minutes.
- Fri Oct 308 pm · Opening
- Sat Oct 318 pm & 10 pmHalloween late night
- Sun Nov 18 pm
- Fri Nov 68 pm
- Sat Nov 78 pm & 10 pmLate night
- Sun Nov 88 pm · Closing
Why advertise
A small room. A full house.
Seventy-five seats a night means every reader of this program is someone who chose to be in the room.
Reach people who show up
Up to 600 patrons across eight performances, each with a complimentary digital program. These are audiences who chose live, ambitious, in-person theatre on a Milwaukee autumn night.
Keep the doors open to everyone
Your ad helps defray the cost of this production, which lets us keep ticket prices reasonable and accessible to all community members: $10 standing room, $25 reserved.
Stand beside a company on the rise
Put your name next to a company that filled a parking lot with Ibsen and a sanctuary with Aeschylus, and is only getting started.
Sponsors & advertisers
In the program.
On the web.
Your ad lights up the program every patron receives. Advertisers and sponsors are showcased on wisconsinclassicstage.com too, so your name reaches people before they ever take a seat, and after they've gone home.
Try it. Type your business name and watch it take its turn in the light.
Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights · Sponsors
Program ad rates
Choose your spot in the program.
Pick a placement and watch it take its place on the page.
Reserve your ad
Three steps to the light.
Send us what you have. We meet you wherever your art is.
Choose your size
Full, half, or quarter page, or one of the premium covers.
Send your art
We accept JPEGs and other e-files. Or we can create a simple graphic from your copy, or match an ad that has already appeared in print or online.
Pay
By check, made out to WISCONSIN CLASSIC STAGE LLC, or by cash.
Electronic fileswisconsinclassicstage@gmail.com
Mail or hard copyWisconsin Classic Stage LLC
1133 E. Morgan Avenue
Milwaukee, WI 53207
(or hand it to your salesperson)
Questions?Artistic Director Cole Castine · cc@wisconsinclassicstage.com