In 2001, Theatre for a New Audience produced the acclaimed production of Edward Bond’s masterpiece Saved, directed by Robert Woodruff.
Beginning Friday, December 5 at The Duke on 42nd Street, Woodruff and Bond will reunite for the New York premiere of Chair. Woodruff is a former Artistic Director of the American Repertory Theatre (A.R.T.), whose productions have played internationally and in New York at BAM, Lincoln Center and the Public Theater. Bond is a renowned British playwright who has been described by The Abbey Theatre, Dublin, as the most influential English dramatist of all times. This is the third pairing of playwright and director who also worked together on Bond’s Olly’s Prison at American Repertory Theatre in 2005.
In Chair, Bond explores theatricality in an austere and concentrated way without embellishment or decoration. Bond envisions a haunting Orwellian world in which audiences will discover a possible future. Stephanie Roth Haberle (who played opposite Mark Rylance in our 1997 production of The Two Gentleman of Verona) plays Alice, whose single kindly gesture of bringing a chair to a soldier waiting for a bus leads to the unimaginable.
Chair has played at the famed Avignon Festival in Paris and toured widely. Visit http://www.tfana.org/ for information.