In the Garden of Dreams
Scenic & Lighting Design
Da Camera of Houston, January 2018,
Conceived of and directed by Sarah Rothenberg
Video & projection Design by Sven Ortel
Select photos by Felix Sanchez
“For a long time a form had been in my mind which I believed to be the only one in which a musician might express himself in the theatre. I called it, in my own private language, making music with the media of the stage…”
— Arnold Schönberg
An imagined Viennese music room where a solitary pianist plays Brahms’s last works gradually transforms into the symbol-rich garden of Schoenberg’s The Book of the Hanging Gardens. Drawing on Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, Strindberg’s A DreamPlay, Max Klinger’s Brahms-Phantasie and the sensual paintings of Gustav Klimt, In the Garden of Dreams moves from dawn (late nineteenth-century) to the dark of night (1908), from a protected Viennese interior to a decaying landscape where Schoenberg’s haunting monodrama, The Book of the Hanging Gardens, reaches its shattering conclusion as reality, dream, memory, and hallucination merge in the mind of an obsessed lover.