The Chair: Thonet No. 14 and the Improvisational Stage
How a nineteenth-century Viennese café chair became the essential prop of improvisational theatre
In virtually every improv black box, one object recurs with near-universal constancy: the bentwood café chair made famous by Michael Thonet. Lightweight, stackable, and infinitely transformable, the Thonet No. 14 became the unofficial prop of improvisational theatre through a convergence of material history and the practical demands of the form.
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