For those who need a dash through Quantum 101, here it is: Quantum is the theater company that always performs in unconventional and challenging spaces, the better to explore the full reach and grasp of its unusual projects. Usually plays from abroad or classics revamped, these are the questing heartchildren of artistic director Karla Boos, whose commitment to the unique and potentially revelatory is absolute.

		'The Human Chair' Where: Quantum Theatre at The Reese Building, 925 Penn Ave., Downtown. When: Through Feb. 5; Fri. 8 p.m.; Sat. 5:30 and 9 p.m.; Sun. 2 p.m. Tickets: $26 (limited student discounts); 412-456-6666. Stage Preview: Quantum director plays new role in next show

That is to say, she raises producing -- conceiving the project and finding the space -- to an art.

But with Boos' latest project, "The Human Chair," we move on to Quantum 102, because for the first time, she is not just artistic producer, scenographer and director, but also playwright, responsible for making a performance piece out of a story by the Japanese writer, Edogawa Rampo.

By calling it a performance piece, I don't deny it's a play -- I've been called to account for that often enough. But I do raise the question. Just what is "The Human Chair"?

The original story is usually called a mystery, a psychological tale of the dark side. Edogawa Rampo is a pseudonym adopted in emulation of Edgar Allan Poe by author Hirai Taro (1894-1965), considered the first Japanese domesticator of the western detective story, which he imbues with his personal and cultural temperament.

I hadn't read the story and decided not to, the better to focus on the play. It tells its tale through letters written by J, a grotesque, love-obsessed artisan, to a successful writer, Eliese, a striking woman with a wealthy lover. As the letters give way to monologue, J becomes bizarrely intimate with Eliese in a fantastical way, and we see her caught up in the perverse purity of his obsession.

It's another variant of the beauty and the beast motif, with all the potential for gothic chills or the Japanese equivalent. But aside from an undeniably creepy premise and a cool, noir atmosphere that has a lot to do with the performing space (more on this to come), emotional tremors don't feel like Boos' true object.

She's in a more contemplative frame of mind. "The Human Chair" is like a dramatized essay on intimacy and the seduction of the perverse. Dramatically, Joseph Losey's "The Servant" and Genet's "The Maids" come to mind, but with less plot. It's like taking us inside that first scene between the Phantom and Christine in "Phantom of the Opera," allowing him to articulate his desires and her to be mesmerized, but without following through to a resolution.

Indeed, there must be many analogous stories, and whatever comes to your mind will express the degree of repulsion/appeal you experience. Perhaps the best analogy is to dreams, and the best analyst would be Freudian.

As the title suggests -- and if you've read this far, you can't be averse to hearing so much -- the artisan's mode of intimacy is to encase himself in an armchair, making it his prison and also an extension of his body.

He does so first to get a secret view of high life, to compensate for his poverty and invisibility. (This class consciousness doesn't translate very well from its Japanese origins to the contemporary urban west in which the play seems to be set.) The object of his obsession ends up owning the chair -- and being possessed by it.

Of interest equal to the story is the setting in a sterile, mechanistic dystopia -- a room in the Reese Building filled with shallow concentric arcs of desks, chairs and TV monitors used by telemarketers. The institutional blandness, fluorescent lighting, dolorous cell phones and piled up computer parts serving as platforms are spooky in themselves.

The result is undeniably intriguing, but still slim. Lasting less than an hour, "The Human Chair" achieves that length only by mixing in video segments of dinner party gossip meant (I assume) to establish the disdainful milieu in which Eliese moves and against which J's subterranean idolatry proves inevitably magnetic.

It's hard to tell, because these video segments, written and directed by Boos and designed by Buzz Miller, have very muddy sound, so it's not clear if the chatterers help flesh out the story or simply provide atmosphere. The video screens are a suitably technological presence, though, most moving when they fall mute at the end, unable to resolve the play's final enigma.

For example, is the whole thing just in Eliese's mind?

Jeff Monahan plays J, who heroically carries most of the story, slithering around Patricia Tallman as the detached Eliese. Monahan initially seems nightmarish, but like any good beast, he gradually achieves sympathy. Indeed, he's never as spooky (or ugly or deformed) as he imagines. Tallman is a fit object of his obsession, but she never reveals much of herself. Perhaps this is intentional.

"The Human Chair" isn't the very best introduction to Quantum, because it doesn't enchant and astonish. But it is accessible, with a piquant story and distinctive Quantumesque staging.

And it has a bonus: A delicious comic film about people and chairs by Elizabeth and Joe Seamans, Mark Knobil, Dan Kamin, Jonathan Peitzman, Dan and Ben Droz and Pittsburgh Filmmakers, which runs continuously an hour or more before each show at street level on Penn Avenue. There's also installation art by Susan Englert in the adjacent window, and another chair paying tribute at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts in Shadyside.

Come to think of it, those humanoid chairs are all around us ....