The Refugee Hotel is a story about family, guilt, exile, haunting pasts, and bright futures. The play revolves around the true stories experienced by a group of Chilean refugees who were seeking asylum from the 1974 coup in Chile. The lighting design for the play supported the two main worlds within the story: the realistic world of the interior, drab, and minimal style of the hotel and the abstract, broken and harsh world of the haunting flashback and nightmare sequences. To enhance the emotional trauma these characters were experiencing, lighting made the nightmare sequences more and more chaotic and painful as the story progressed.