Hello there!

As I prepare to direct the dazzling Light Shining in Buckinghamshire by Caryl Churchill for my MFA thesis at Columbia, I’m reaching out on behalf of my incredible team to ask for your support in creating a production that reflects both our vision and our values.

We are fundraising in order to:

• Compensate artists! Specifically, this money will allow us to pay our fantastic, dedicated ensemble of actors; and our brilliant composer, who is creating new vocal music specifically for this production. 
• Support our production costs! Our artistic vision for this deeply resonant yet complex play involves specific design choices that will help illuminate Churchill’s text for a contemporary American audience. 

Creating a production realized to the fullest, especially within an academic context, takes a lot of resources. I’m honored beyond measure to be working with this text and with collaborators I revere, and any support you can provide will go directly towards facilitating the fullest version of what we can achieve.  

Donors will receive a “Special Thanks” in our program (unless you’d prefer to remain anonymous), and reserved seats at the performance of your choice.

Thank you so very much,

Talia F

(fundraiser created with support from our show's producer, Melissa)

About the production:

Light Shining in Buckinghamshire will be presented at the Lenfest Center at Columbia on September 18th-21st. Tickets are free to the public.

About the play:

In the seminal English playwright Caryl Churchill’s Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, the vision of a better world feels closer than ever. Old powers are being toppled, and who knows what will come next? New voices speak loudly from unexpected places. Radical ideas about politics, money, religion, and morality flow freely across all strata of society. The disenfranchised find new agency through activist uprising; through breaking of social norms; through joining movements that promote commitment to utopian ideals or promise to take their country back from elite control and foreign influence. Leaders debate popular participation in government, private property, the rights owed to their constituents. Some people think the world is ending. Real, true, material change… doesn’t happen. 

Light Shining in Buckinghamshire may be set in late 1640s England– when Civil War had disrupted the country, deposed the king, and led to a proliferation of radical thought and action– and written in 1970s England, but it has a lot to say to the 2025 United States. Conceived for an American audience who may be unfamiliar with the history behind this famously (and gloriously) complex play, this production’s theatrically expansive yet precise approach aims to illuminate contemporary resonance while also investigating the experiential reality of its 17th century setting and subjects, whose distant lives provide perspective on our own.