READING #3 Behind the Screen Door

Page 1

- One of the most Iconic images of American popular culture of the 90's came from television. Sitcoms like Seinfield and I love Lucy were some of the many hit comedies that captured audiences attention.

- In the world of Sitcoms, which is true in drama, is the concept of the "door". The door serves as a barrier against the chaos that lurks just beyond. A border in which the action ensues back and forth until the door is closed again and harmony and balance are restored.

-Stages, movies, and TV shows depict rooms with doors in which characters come and go in order to push the dramatic action. The door marks a beginning and an end, similar to the language of computers is a binary that is a digital doorway: open or closed.

-The door sets up a rhythm- it is a visual equivalent to a metronome- that regulates the action but sets up the expectations

-The door is the most profound technological and scenographic development of theater. It is hard to conceive theater without it. The introduction of the door delineated two seperate spaces, the world seen and unseen.

Page 2
- The door delineates two spaces, the known and the unknown.
- Door opening on stage manifests infinite possibilities.
- Door closing on stage represents extinguished possibilities and death.

- Says theater is similar to peek-a-boo, using a curtain to begin and end wonderment for us.

- For every introduction there is a reaction, i.e. “if a gun appears in the first act, it must go off by the last… if a door is closed in the first act, it must be opened by the last, or vice versa.”(55).

- First known use of a door on the stage was around 460 BC, Aeschylus’ The Oresteia.
- None of the known plays before it required a door.
- No door leads to less structure, possibly just an altar.

- In The Persians, actors enter on a long path rather than a door.

Page 3:

- Audience cannot experience surprise (p. 56) because entrances to Greek theater unfolded through time
- Exits took on the attribute of musical chords fading out
- Function of doors in Greek theater:
- “altered rhythm of the tragedy”
- allows "cinematic rhythm"
- allows time elipses
- creates drama
- violence rare for Greek theater because they didn't think murder could be accurately depicted unless with a door
- allowed audience to image alternate worlds
- allowed space is transformed

Page 4:


The door is the gateway between worlds.

It is where actors become the character. On stage there used to be two doors on either side of the stage to symbolize a change or a transition between the actual person back stage, and the character being portrayed.

Between doorways we have the neutral zone. The area in which there is nothing, you are changing. You are not the character, and you are not you. You are nothing.

Doorways are the way to connect two different places without being either one. A door connects a kitchen and a living room, but the doorway is not either the kitchen or the living room. It is the doorway, its own entity of transition. in a sence, nothing at all. Our perception only gives it meaning.

page 5:

- Doors are symbols of salvation: New Testament, John
- Doorways are often a place of sacrifice, or a place to deposit items for safekeeping

- Almost in all cases, the passageway between the world of the living and the dead is marked by a door
- Egyptian underworld has 12 doors
- Valhalla has 540 doors

- The door can establish a comic rhythm or a tragic one

- Keaton devised a house of doors
- made so to protect his father and the woman he loves
- symbolizes Keaton's world to protect the good and destroy evil

Page 6:
-20th century= intense shift when artists and poets began to question the absolute authority of external reality.
-author Chekov= one main culprit as he tried to break down the distinction between spaces (the visible and the invisible).
-author brings to light Beckett's Waiting for Godot, stating that ultimately Estragon and Vladimir (the two protagonists) cannot leave, because there is no door!
- author writes that we are living in a time of uncertainty and that is responsible for a theater with no doors.
- all the same, the author is clear to write that "without doors, there can be no grand exit, and thus there is no finality."
-difference between theater and television is brought to light: the image on a TV "is isolated in a box within a room within a house where it becomes one object among many.