Chaired

January 2026

Early in what would be a 21-year academic stint in Arizona, I felt the need to mark our new nest in some way, my partner having taken over that responsibility with far more gusto and speed than I. This desire was also an acknowledgment of my newfound financial stability;  with this fulltime teaching job I could afford some new furniture, a feathering more than simply functional, and a deliberate purchase instead of dumpster dive.

I bought a chair. An armchair, more precisely. Evoking permanence and continuity,  heavy and decidedly non-portable, it would not be casually moved to another place. My prior jobs had been peripatetic and kinetic, moving from school to school within the New York City area teaching movement to children, with the occasional university adjunct gig, while intermittently presenting and touring my performance work. I spent a lot of time on buses and trains.  My apartment was very small. My thirties and forties may have seldom been truly comfortable, financially or domestically, but I remained decidedly mobile. With the new job and home, I wanted to perch on something that did not feel transitory.

The chair presented itself at an arts fair in downtown Phoenix. We were just getting acclimated to the place (does one get truly “acclimated” to extreme climates?), trying to integrate/ingratiate ourselves with the local art community. What better way than to purchase something big, solid, defiantly arty and locally made? Labeled ““Beat Street” and designed by artist Mike Kochneff, the chair resembled furnishings one would find on the 1960’s animated television show, The Jetsons, though in a faux-western muted color scheme; that cartoon family de-saturated and living a cargo-cult existence in the desert. With the back of the chair winging-out like a pair of 1950’s cats-eye sunglasses, and large round holes in the supporting armature, it appeared both retro and futuristic, as do tailfins and bullet bumpers. My chair’s charms felt slightly threatening, a benign Buick bearing horns crashing a BDSM party, score by Sergio Leone.  Behind that severe chair-back, a ledge resembling a running board, allowing the person leaning over you, bouffant and plunging neckline, to set down their drink. Before settling onto you, precariously; there’s a lot of metal.

This art object was not quite comfy enough for long periods of reading, its arch artfulness, somewhat severe and less than embracing, as aesthetics can be. Recognizing this, I soon purchased a second chair, a more traditional leather behemoth from a local department store. Securing solid, stolid new furniture from traditional retail felt truly middle class and middle-aged. A legacy, something in which to fiddle with one’s overpriced watch while reading Proust and giving sage advice to…someone. I did not notice in my consumerist zeal that the feel of this luxury item evoked cold vinyl more than the warm embrace of leather.

As I’ve aged, I’ve become ever more nested, settling down for the long term. Nice stuff that lasts, and sticks around to acquire patina and gravitas, matters. I want possessions with something of a pedigree (even if entirely personal). Midway through my years in Arizona, I began to detour toward a consignment shop in Scottsdale; lots of expensive stuff marked down. Rich people may die, but we expect them to leave fancier things behind. I found an enormous armless armchair with modernist curves, so capacious it could sit two (my husband and I are slender fellas).  The furniture equivalent of a 1970’s Cadillac deVille or Oldsmobile Toronado, the chair is curvaceously ugly/sexy yet sensuous/comfy. Excessive and vaguely erotic. I bought it when my husband was out of town. He’s a visual artist and finds my decorative skills wanting. Grumpy about the purchase, he acknowledged that it fits the “eclectic” look of our house, “eclectic” being the word chosen by young people trying to be nice and older people not trying: “Oh, your home is so…eclectic.”

I’m thinking of characters and their armchairs. Star Trek’s Captain Kirk swiveling about, Charlie Chaplin and Jack Oakie in The Great Dictator, portraying Hitler and Mussolini clownishly elevating themselves higher and higher in their respective thrones. There is the expressive “Chary” of Pee Wee’s Playhouse,  with her flopping armrests and flirtatious eyelash batting, “Sit on me, Pee Wee!”  The actor Clint Eastwood delivered a wandering, abruptly improvised address to an empty chair at the 2012 Republican convention, imagining (or so it was claimed) it occupied by the current President, Barack Obama.  Much sharper was the anthropomorphic and chatty chair referenced in performance artist Beth Lapides’ solo several years ago, “And then the chair said, ‘When the bomb comes, you will die with the rest.’ “ This was in the 1980’s, when The End, the much feared collapse of comfort and continuity threatened to arrive via atomic bomb attack. Even the furniture was afraid.

The late theatre director and visual artist Robert Wilson had a way with chairs, constructing elegantly spare theatrical structures that de-center comfort to position the performer’s body as sculpture. He kept a collection of chairs at his Watermill center, understanding how central they are not only to set design but to human motion. Chairs are points in a continuum, places of pause, and give performers a reference point, an anchor and sometimes a weapon. In Eugène Ionesco’s 1952 play The Chairs, the stage gradually fills with seats with no one sitting in them, while the two main characters chatter as if in conversation with all of them. Likewise, the play refuses to settle on logic. Steven Dietz’ 1993 Lonely Planet  transforms the two old people from Ionesco’s play and puts them in a store selling maps. The chairs collected by one character and dragged into the shop are the furniture of friends who have died of a plague, never named, but clearly AIDS. Collecting someone’s chairs enshrines their memory. As in the last act of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, chairs stand in for those who are forever gone. The solo performance artist John Bernd, who died of AIDS in 1988, frequently performed with a small red chair, which continued to represent him after his death. Director Ivo van Hove’s 2010  production of Lillian Hellman’s 1939 play THE LITTLE FOXES at New York Theatre Workshop provided no chairs, nothing at all for the characters to plant themselves. Elizabeth Marvel, playing the dominating and destructive Regina Gibbons, a hurricane in constant motion, could not rest or perch. Neither could any member of the family she viewed as prey. The most basic of theatre directions is “get your lines down and don’t fall over the furniture.” Or, as I encouraged my acting students, make it a “bit.” If it’s not in the script, maybe it’s in the scenery. In a production directed by Marshall Mason, I portrayed the inept Gayev in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. When not miming billiards, he speaks to an inanimate bookcase, admiring its solidity, history, stability; a foil that cannot talk back. A drawing of assorted chairs became the logo for Dixon Place, a New York presenter of new work known for many years for its shifting locations with a tangle of assorted furniture. They now have a formal theatre with uniform seating, but the logo remains.

Three years ago,  I left my position and place in Arizona for semi-retirement at our “house in the country” in upstate New York.  We decided to give away almost everything in the Arizona house to my colleagues and students; a sort of professorial potlatch. But not  the chairs. I was sure, as amateurs often are, that these specific possessions had gained in value. I was wrong. No one wanted them (the curse of the eclectic?). Between the three of them I netted $200. The only chair I kept, and insisted on shipping to New York, was one recently purchased; a “nursing chair” with accompanying rocking ottoman so comfortable I was sure I would spend hours in it, though not nursing (or in nursing home). I haven’t. Banished to my upstairs office for being too ugly, its aspirational comfort and security calls to me, while I sit in office chair at office desk, reinforcing that I am “doing something” official and important. I sink into an armchair to read only when I cannot devise more obligatory action.

I feel unsettled by the realization that I seldom sit in most of my chairs. When I read (a primary activity) it’s in the rather staid leather chair, leaving the other two for when I simply want to sit and do nothing. But my “doing nothing” tends to be mobile, fussing about, dancing away kinetic energy, not sitting and contemplating. These chairs, like old friends, wait for me to stop meandering and just land somewhere. Contemporary life being an exhausting game of musical chairs, we seldom hear the musical cues. Most chairs being ultimately uncomfortable, we humans can’t get too settled into our new position before something in our bodies suggests we could be better somewhere else. Mistaking mere movement for action, we sink into and settle on, only to spring up, energized and eager for something less sedentary, promising what? In the comfort of a chair we imagine leaving it, going outside to wander the world, abandoning this perch for another more dynamic position. We sit waiting, hoping the small motor movements of reading, typing, filing, sorting, moving words and images around will result in some greater action. We sit in the theatre, wondering if we will leap to our feet as a symbol of respect and appreciation for the actors or shuffle out unsatisfied. Our chairs sit tight, awaiting our weight and our will.