A Doll's House: An Immersive Victorian Christmas

A Play. A House. A Secret.

It is Christmas Eve, and you are invited inside a historic Victorian mansion in San Francisco. It is a lavish, living holiday world. The hearth is warm, golden light spills across festive parlors, and someone is at the piano playing something lovely.

Nora Helmer has just come home with armfuls of packages, snow on her shoulders, and a secret she has kept for eight years.

You follow the story through the house, moving from formal parlors into the intimate private chambers of a family dressed for the season. Sip champagne, steal a forbidden macaroon, and watch the feverish tarantella danced just feet from where you stand as a marriage begins to unravel.

Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House scandalized Europe when it premiered four days before Christmas in 1879, and the plot remains unsettling today.

It is a Christmas play, though it is rarely produced as one, a raw look at how easily we trap ourselves in pleasing everyone else, until only one question remains: What does it truly take to escape?

A breathtaking new San Francisco holiday tradition. And the last Christmas Eve in the Helmer’s perfect home.

The Helmers are expecting you.

A production of San Francisco Classical Theatre, presented in collaboration with the Haas-Lilienthal House, the Gregangelo Museum, and San Francisco Heritage.

About the Venue

Built in 1886, the Haas-Lilienthal House is a San Francisco Landmark and U.S. National Treasure. As the only fully intact Queen Anne Victorian home open to the public in San Francisco with its original period furnishings, it survived the 1906 Earthquake and Fire and offers a rare look into authentic living history