Paranoid Futurism or Totalitarian Realism?

Chair, by Edward Bond, directed by Robert Woodruff, scenic and costume design by David Zinn, produced by Theatre for a New Audience, The Duke on 42nd Street, December 11–28, 2008.

The modernist austerity of Chair is evident even in its title. Bond apparently pared away the excess of the definite article and the plural: too many letters, too many words, too many chairs. Perhaps he feared confusion with Ionesco’s The Chairs. Robert Woodruff’s skintight direction clings faithfully to the play’s ascetic structure and tone. If there are faults with the production, they belong to the play and perhaps to our own weary sensibilities in receiving such a work at this time in history.

The play is divided into a series of “pictures” as indicated by the projections of identifying title cards at the start of what would otherwise be known as “scenes.” “Picture 1” reveals David Zinn’s antiseptically white set: three interior walls painted all white, two white doors symmetrically placed on either side of the back wall, a curtained window stage right. There is the “chair” of the title, placed against the back wall, along with a simple table and two other chairs. The only decorations are three dozen child’s drawings, each signed “Billy,” taped to the back wall. New Age music intones as the lights go up on a matronly woman standing at the window, peering out, and Billy, seated at the desk, drawing.

Billy is at first a confusing figure. Is he in fact a child? Mentally retarded? Is it the theatrical device of having an adult play a child character? Billy’s costume prolongs the ambiguity: it is equal parts Williamsburg hipster and third grade. Who is this woman with him, who nervously looks out the window? Is Billy being kept after school by his teacher? The scene is both commonplace and disconcertingly strange and unlocatable. The woman at the window, Alice (Stephanie Roth Haberle), wears a loose, dowdy, printed brown, dropwaisted shirt-dress that gives her an air of schoolmarmish primness, complementing how tightly her hair is pulled back from her face. She is severe, stern, worn down, for reasons that aren’t immediately clear. This “picture” is a curious one. It’s hard to tell what era these characters inhabit, given the costumes and the surgical whiteness of the set that omits any other clues. Sometime between the 1920s and the present is the best that can be discerned. Startlingly, the stage directions in the text of the play place the action in 2077.

When they speak after an uncomfortable silence, the mood darkens. “What are you looking at?” Billy asks. “A soldier.” The soldier has a prisoner. Alice says she recognizes the prisoner. The soldier and the prisoner are waiting outside at a bus stop. The petulant child pesters Alice until he gets a look. Twice he says that the prisoner looks like Alice, an ominous note. Alice shoos him away from the window because she’s afraid someone will see him. “People will know you’re here.” He’s not allowed to go out. The mystery deepens even as more is revealed. “I’d like to see real things,” Billy says.

The world quickly and efficiently emerging from this picture and the short exchange of dialogue is cut from a certain tradition of modernism. Beckett comes to mind at once, his post-apocalyptic worlds in which one or two lonely and disconnected figures operate in a secluded part of a desolate world. Harold Pinter’s deliberately undefined domestic and political scenes host similar figures and themes: thugs, frightened fugitives, totalitarian oppression, despair, the vague impossibility of hope under unimaginably grim circumstances, morbid humor. In particular, his Mountain Language and One for the Road have this quality and structure. Caryl Churchill, Sarah Kane, Howard Barker, Howard Brenton, and many other canonized writers of contemporary British drama have dwelt here.

It is a world whose idiom we have grown to understand and recognize after decades of theatrical training. The characters never have extensive “back stories” that are given in full. A few isolated fragments of vague...