The Ghost Sonata

This site-specific reinterpretation of August Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata transforms the historic Stage 5 at Red Studios Hollywood into a decaying Art Deco dream palace—once a space of cinematic illusion, now a haunted relic of its own mythology. Developed as part of an immersive design exploration, the concept draws from the play’s surreal, dreamlike structure and reimagines it through the lens of early 20th-century Hollywood.

The audience experience begins outside the stage doors, where they follow the Student—recast as an eager young actor—toward his “audition.” What begins as a conventional house set slowly reveals itself to be an illusion. As the story unfolds and the characters' façades crumble, the physical environment deteriorates in real time: mirrored walls fracture, velvet drapes decay, and structural elements shift and collapse through controlled movement, pulling the audience deeper into the dream’s disintegration.

The design merges celestial Art Deco elegance with the brutalist understructure hidden beneath—symbolizing the play’s core themes of illusion, social decay, and spiritual disillusionment. Influenced by the visual language of silent cinema, the production positions the characters as archetypes within a dying dream factory: the Student as the idealistic newcomer, the Old Man as a forgotten producer pulling invisible strings, and the Young Lady as a fading ingénue trapped in a narrative she cannot escape.

As the set slowly collapses around them, the audience is immersed in a layered, sensory experience that blurs the lines between performance and reality—revealing the fragile machinery behind the stories we tell and the dreams we sell.