The Chair: Thonet No. 14 and the Improvisational Stage

In virtually every improv black box, from the rehearsal rooms of The Second City to the converted storefronts where community troupes gather, one object recurs with near-universal constancy: the bentwood café chair made famous by Michael Thonet in the mid-nineteenth century. Lightweight, stackable, instantly readable, and economically democratic, the Thonet No. 14 — later designated the No. 214 — became the unofficial prop of improvisational theatre not through deliberate adoption but through a convergence of material history, institutional context, and the practical demands of the form itself.

Origins in the Vienna Workshop

Michael Thonet (1796–1871), a German-born furniture maker who established his workshop in Vienna, developed his signature steam-bending technique in the 1840s and 1850s. By subjecting beech rods to pressurized steam and then forcing them into curved forms, Thonet's craftsmen could produce elegant curves without joints, carving, or upholstery. The resulting chairs were structurally sound, far cheaper than carved wood furniture, and capable of being disassembled into six components — seat, back loop, two front legs, and two rear legs — and shipped flat in compact crates. An 1859 catalogue boasted that thirty-six disassembled chairs could be packed into a single cubic metre.

Thonet's Vienna showroom, opened in 1849, and his subsequent factory in Koritschan (now Korytná, Czech Republic) established the model of industrial craft production that would define the firm for the next century. The chair known as No. 14 entered production in 1859. By 1930, an estimated fifty million units had been sold worldwide. The design's durability, its iconic silhouette — a continuous loop of bent beech forming the back and rear legs as a single piece — and its ubiquity in Central European coffeehouses gave it an immediate semantic density: to place the No. 14 in a room was to invoke the café, the salon, the waiting room, the committee chamber.

The Chair in the Theatrical Tradition

The adoption of Thonet chairs in theatrical and rehearsal spaces was partly economic and partly aesthetic. By the early twentieth century, the No. 14 was the default seating of public assembly: it appeared in meeting rooms, lecture halls, and the backstage areas of European theatres, where its lightness meant it could be rearranged quickly and its sturdiness meant it survived hard use. In the Brechtian and post-Brechtian tradition of theatre-making, the chair became a deliberately democratic stage object — present, functional, unadorned. Bertolt Brecht's collaborators noted his preference for visible, utilitarian props that refused theatrical illusion; the Thonet chair, in its unremarkable familiarity, embodied that preference exactly.

Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed, developed in Brazil from the 1960s onward, also worked closely with the chair as both prop and structural device. In Forum Theatre exercises, chairs defined the spatial grammar of scenes: their placement established power, their absence marked vulnerability. Boal's techniques filtered into applied theatre traditions that would later cross with the improv world.

Adoption in Improv

The transformation of the Thonet chair into a specifically improvisational object is inseparable from the material conditions of American improv's formative spaces. The Compass Players performed in the back rooms of Chicago bars and cabarets in the mid-1950s; The Second City opened on North Wells Street in 1959 in a rented room that had been a Chinese laundry. Both venues were furnished with whatever was cheap, available, and movable. The café chair — already inexpensive by mid-century — was the natural answer.

The chair's improvisational utility, however, runs deeper than economics. Its visual neutrality makes it maximally transformable. In the hands of an experienced improviser, the No. 14 becomes a car door, a judge's bench, a horse, a dance partner. Its height — standard café chairs seat the occupant at a slightly elevated angle that reads clearly to an audience — makes the performer legible across a dark room. Its back provides a prop relationship that communicates instantly: leaning on a chair back signals authority; perching on its seat signals anxiety; turning it backward and straddling it signals a studied informality that teachers and directors have deployed in training contexts for decades.

Three specific improv applications deserve note. The hot seat — in which a performer in character fields questions from the ensemble or audience — almost invariably uses a single chair placed center stage, isolated in space, surrounded by standing performers or audience members. The chair's physical singularity literalizes the psychological pressure of the exercise. The empty chair technique, adapted from psychodrama and Gestalt therapy, places an imagined figure or absent relationship in an unoccupied chair; improvisers use this both in training exercises and in performance formats exploring character interiority. The object work chair is the simplest deployment: using the chair as raw material for mime and transformation exercises, training the improviser's relationship to defined, persistent objects in the absence of theatrical furniture.

An Object with No Irony

What the Thonet No. 14 offers the improviser is what it has always offered: a form that is complete without being specific, a presence that is functional without being decorative, a material that holds meaning without insisting on it. The chair does not pretend. It was never designed to be invisible, and in improv, invisibility is not the goal — transformation is. The chair is always already the chair, and from that stable baseline, it can become anything.

Production of the original Thonet design continues today through Gebrüder Thonet, established by Michael Thonet's sons and still operating in Frankenberg, Germany. The No. 214 remains in continuous production — the same chair, in the same beech bentwood, shipped in the same flat-packed six-piece kit, to theatres and café rooms and improv black boxes across the world.