Chairs
Chairs.
We knew this seating had to be wood,
and we knew we wouldn’t want to bring down more trees…
When I was in my thirties, I became obsessed with chairs. I had chairs hanging from the ceiling, from the walls, sitting corners. Waiting. All unmatched, all wooden. Mostly straight back or bentwood, though I particularly loved those kinds of chairs that reminded me of school: old chairs for young people – practical, unadorned, durable. Hanging from hooks, ready to be brought down off the ceiling and walls for gatherings – for the time when another car pulls up the driveway.
Of course, there was symbolism in that. No driveway in the city. And I’m not great at family. So, my chairs were often empty, and I found something comforting in those absences – coming home to design, not to people, each chair having been sketched out, conceived and built by someone I’ll never know.
Empty chairs are signs.
They mean things.
Absence. Expectation.
An invitation to witness.
To build a history.
Elijah may come.
One chair of eight sits empty at the LA Phil.
Clint Eastwood embarrasses himself at a national convention.
Don McLean laments:
Morning comes and morning goes with no regret
And evening brings the memories I can't forget
Empty rooms that echo as I climb the stairs
And empty clothes that drape and fall on empty chairs
About the same time, I met and began working with the opera director Günter Krämer, who viewed chairs as theater. Brutally minimalist polished steel for Wozzeck. Large, dated period pieces for Die Tote Stadt. An unexplained, overturned Thonet sitting downstage to introduce Jenufa. Kitsch in someone else’s hands; thought provoking from Günter, using chairs to tell us what has happened, what may happen. Chairs and benches, their designs indicating histories, their own lives recycled from one play to another. A stool once symbolizing Lear’s fall, now supports Seurat in a park in Paris. Martha, raging at George, does not know she sits on the centerpiece of the Tyrone family’s living room, where Edmund broods. These ‘seating’ histories are not just of the stage, but also of the audience; chairs and benches occupied by theatergoers whose experience is deeply affected by these objects they are not thinking about, the objects most likely taking up most of the floor space in the concert hall or temple, the objects they are sitting on. Designed, for them, mostly waiting.
How we gather to hear music together tells us a lot about what we’re about to hear, are hearing, just heard. The velvet seat, the blanket, the muddy field, the pew. The seat, its direction and its view, are the opening of the show – the silence before the music; the object of the silence before the story that is a part of the story – the first part.
Seating poses one of the considerable challenges we face in presenting Farming outside in a field: how we create a theater with a relatively light footprint, that feels like it belongs there (if that’s possible). Seating that introduces us to the idea of a story told unconventionally. In this case, the landscape is the set, and the theater is largely defined by where the viewers gather, where they sit, if they sit. Not bound by walls nor ceilings, aisles nor rows, we’ve had choices: In what direction shall the sun set in relation to the viewer? Barn as backdrop or set piece? What of the quiet line of trees hugging the bank of the Neshaminy Creek?
We knew this seating had to be wood, and we knew we wouldn’t want to bring down more trees to create something new. So, we snooped around, relying on our (patient, organized, persistent, calm, effective) stage manager Kate Nelson, whose “other job” is a similar role at the Arden Theatre. Both The Arden and The Crossing are in the business of telling stories, but the former’s daily concerns, unlike those of The Crossing’s (on an average day), are the elements of staged plays: sets, lights, props, costumes, benches, chairs, stools, and a whole slew of other places to sit.
With director Ashley Tata and designer Nia Easley, Kate has assembled a delightfully mismatched menagerie of chairs and benches. Desk chairs and Windsor chairs and folding chairs and armchairs chairs from our hosts at Kings Oaks Farm and church benches and picnic benches, and “I just wanted to make this thing with my hands” benches. All with stories of the theater – and, importantly, likely before the theater. Stories that we will never know. Which of these benches has served at the banquet of The Scottish play? Which chairs have endured Chekhov’s melancholia? Which have survived Sweeney Todd’s knife? Which have paid the attention Linda Loman demands?
Where are the actors that played these roles? And where the audiences that have shared time, gathered together in one of our stranger and most enduring rituals: sitting intimately close together in a theater with people we don’t know, focused on a shared experience that we often wind up comprehending similarly. The passing measures of their lives, and ours, intersect, unwittingly, and that brief common history lies in the places we sit, in the wood from which the seats are made, in the trees felled for that wood in some forest in a forgotten location that is the origin of a forgotten history. How long were they trees? How much longer their histories than those who cut them, those who designed them or drilled, sanded, and varnished them; those who sat or will sit upon them? What are the stories of the tree, the chair, the persons before us, and those after us?
And that’s the wonder of our work.
Their stories are ours and they are the stories we tell when singing. They came to the theater, to the concert hall, and sat for the same reason we gather for Farming – be that as performer or receiver. My blog isn’t about wood or trees or Kate’s chair arsenal. It’s about storytelling: my story (and my hanging chairs) and everyone else touching Farming. Finding ever-new ways to tell the stories that we do know, while accepting that we cannot know many of the histories that shape the background of our lives. Like Guarre characters, we tumble forward, unaware of much of the design of our lives. Here, never knowing the history quietly carried in a practical chair like those my parents and my grandparents sat upon in grammar school, or in a simple bench that someone with a little extra time, and maybe a need to express, decided needed some vines and flowers carved into the wood.
Benches and chairs placed in semicircles from which we, like the Ancient Greeks, deduce that there is a story coming, over there, in what Peter Brooks calls The Empty Space. Like them, we hope we will recognize ourselves in the stories being told, and be reminded of our humanity. A humanity of histories of those onstage and those off – The Tartuffes and Toscas, and those pulling the chairs down from the hooks on the walls to hear the same tale, retold.
Myths and stories, from William Penn to Jeff Bezos, in Farming, heard and seen on a collection of misfit wooden chairs. Gathered among knee-high corn in Bucks County. Designed. Waiting.
We are nearly ready.
