For Doll House, I worked as Lighting Designer in collaboration with the Set Designer and Director Beau Coleman, to create a visual space that revealed — rather than disguised — the structures of domestic expectation and social control inherent in Ibsen’s story. Even though the play is rooted in the 19th-century, our adaptation re-imagined that “house” as a transparent stage — no curtains, no hidden machinery, no illusions. All light instruments and technical elements remained visible — part of the world, part of the oppression.

This “everything-on-stage” approach served two purposes. First, it exposed the artifice of theatrical space, transforming the play into a show-within-a-show: the audience watches not just the characters, but the mechanisms of their narrative, always aware of the systems that frame them. Second, the visible instruments and harsh lighting underscored the fragility and exposure of the main character’s world — where privacy and shelter are illusions, and the emotional weight of secrets becomes unbearably public. The light itself becomes a metaphor for scrutiny, judgment, and revelation.

Working closely with the set-designer we integrated lighting fixtures into the set design — sometimes as decorative elements, sometimes as intrusive beams — so the boundary between “house décor” and “technical apparatus” dissolved. The resulting atmosphere felt claustrophobic, hyper-aware, and uncomfortably real: a home that is constantly under observation, constantly under pressure. In a production already stripped of domestic comfort, the lighting accentuated the rawness of truth, the suffocation of expectation and the violence of social roles.

Through this process, I learned how light — when fully exposed and honest — can carry far more emotional weight than any hidden effect ever could. Doll House reminded me that illumination is not always soft: sometimes revealing reality means refusing illusion.