THE PERSIANS by Aeschylus

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The world’s very first surviving play returns with startling urgency. 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. Our production digs into that ancient audacity and brings it roaring into the present. Josh Pohja directs with a vision that shatters distance, shimmers with invention, and refuses to let history repeat itself quietly. What happens when a victorious nation dares to grieve the people it conquered? Come find out. You won’t believe what you see.

Gertrude Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights detonates onstage like a ritual of language and light—her 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.

And returning to the stage to ignite it is Josh Pohja, reinventing his tour-de-force Faustus—a performance Backstage Magazinehailed as a “brilliant portrayal of Faustus.” This new incarnation pushes deeper and stranger, a Faustus who pulses with desire, terror, ambition, and the glow of the modern world he’s desperate to command.

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.

Launching the Wisconsin Chekhov Project (2027–2030)

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 not as distant Russian melancholy, but 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. Under the direction of Josh Pohja, 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 Vanya embraces the humor, heartbreak, and absurdity that Chekhov so brilliantly entwines. The characters’ yearnings ring with startling familiarity when placed in the hands of those who work, steward, and sometimes feel trapped by Wisconsin’s vast rural landscape.

As the first chapter of the Wisconsin Chekhov Project, Uncle Vanya sets the tone for a reimagining of the entire Chekhov canon; bold, rooted, expansive, and deeply human. This is Chekhov grown in Wisconsin soil, where the laughter lands hard, the sorrow runs deep, and the beauty feels earned.