Edward Bond's
Chair, now playing at the Duke on 42nd Street in a Theatre for a New Audience production, begins with simple mysteriousness and rapidly accelerates to levels of truly thrilling tautness and disconcerting brutality.

Set in London in the year 2077, Chair centers on Alice (Stephanie Roth Haberle), a nervous middle-aged woman, and Billy (Will Rogers), a mentally and physically challenged young man, who share an apartment. As the play opens, Alice is fixated on what she sees outside the window: a soldier (played with both fierceness and a certain denseness by Alfredo Narciso) and a prisoner (Joan Macintosh) whom he's escorting. Somehow, the prisoner seems familiar to Alice.

In a[...]