DOCTOR FAUSTUS LIGHTS THE LIGHTS to Make Milwaukee Premiere at Halloween
Composer Lincoln Donner and director Cole Castine collaborate on a 360-degree staging inside Calvary Presbyterian Church.
Wisconsin Classic Stage will illuminate Milwaukee's Halloween season with the city's professional premiere of Gertrude Stein's Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, an immersive operetta running October 30 through November 8, 2026, in the Sanctuary Hall of Calvary Presbyterian Church. Capped at 75 audience members a night, 25 Reserved Seating and 50 Standing Rooms tickets the piece immerses its audience in 360 degrees of spectral light, live monophonic score, and Stein's incantatory language, transforming a 1938 opera libretto that was never officially scored into a ritual built entirely from scratch.
Composer Lincoln Donner has developed a haunting monophonic score threaded with spectral choral textures in close collaboration with Cole Castine who directs, designs and illuminates the production.
The production arrives at the midpoint of Wisconsin Classic Stage's inaugural season, following its impressive runs of Henry V, The Persians and the company's recent acclaimed staging of Ibsen's Ghosts (in a parking lot). WCS is seizing works the Modern Stage has left behind and re-inventing them back into urgent, embodied life for Wisconsin audiences.
In Stein's fractured, electric text, Faustus has traded his soul for the power of artificial light and lives suspended in a world of endless illumination, attended only by a dog and a boy. A woman, Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel, is born in the forest, bitten by a viper, and comes to him seeking to be healed. Tormented by his own soullessness, Faustus bargains for hell; the Devil names the price as murder, then dangles a further temptation: eternal youth, if Faustus can persuade the woman to follow him into damnation. She refuses, firmly, choosing to reside in the living world.
What emerges is an absurd, tragicomic, and startlingly modern meditation on knowledge, identity, and the hunger to illuminate every last darkness. Written 87 years ago, Stein's Faustus lands today with unnerving precision: in an era racing to build machines that can know more than any human mind, what remains of the soul once knowledge no longer needs us?
From Artistic Director, Cole Castine: “Stein's Faustus hands you a world and asks what happens when you get inside the material? With our current production of Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights we look to offer audiences an experience they will not get anywhere else. Something real, something immediate and immersive, a living breathing world that the audience can step right into. The detailed stained glass lining the walls of the Sanctuary will be the bounding boxes of five distinct lighting installations spread throughout the church. Light as a primary story teller, as sculpture, as installation and as an inescapable prison of Faust's own creation.”
From Executive Producer, Josh Pohja: “In 1938, Gertrude Stein wrote about a man consumed by the hunger for infinite light and infinite knowledge, without ever stopping to ask how that hunger for intelligence might cost his soul,” said Josh Pohja, Executive Producer of Wisconsin Classic Stage. “Ninety years later, we are watching that same appetite play out around us. We are building machines designed to know more, process more, scale more, move faster and faster. What happens to the human being when we build something that can know everything but cannot feel, suffer, wonder, or love? Is there a soul inside a machine? Cole's production explores that question through text, music, movement, and spectacle.”
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