Behind the Screen Door Summary

Doors are oft used objects in plays or shows which people often take for granted. Used in today's sitcoms as well as the dramas of the ancient times, doors represent a divide or barrier of some sort, between the known and the unknown. Doors block off a chaos which cannot be seen by the audience, yet they are so easily penetrated by the forces outside. Doors are important because a major part of theater is the constant entrances and exits by different characters. They can represent a beginning and an end, as well as a flow of new information to the audience. Theater can be seen as a door to the inner human soul, and doors on stage can emulate this idea. Every time a door is swung open, an infinite number of possibilities can be brought to the forefront of a play.
However doors were not always used on stage in drams. The first recorded use of a door in drama was around 460 BC in The Oresteia. Before The Oresteia was produced and the use of doors was made part of theater, the Greeks, on the Acropolis, introduced and brought characters on stage gradually. Using the rolling hills behind the stage, the Greeks had characters walk onto stage using long processions. The audience would see this, and to ease the long and tedious walk, the Greeks would have a narrator introduce the character while they made their way to the stage. It may have worked, but it took away the surprise, and the audience knew which characters were going to be on stage long before the character actually got there.
When doors were introduced, the rhythm of dramatic theater was drastically changed. Characters could enter and exit a set quickly, bringing surprise to the stage. Doors also allowed playwrights to accomplish things which they did not feel could be realistically portrayed in front of an audience. One such example is the act of murder. In Agamemnon, a door is used to conceal a murder. The audience cannot see the act, but hear the screams and flailing of the actor behind the door. The door leaves the imagination of the audience to fill in the gaps of what happened, a thought more horrific than could actually be portrayed by live actors.
Doors represent a threshold which belongs to neither side it governs. Still, passing through a door can represent many things, such as a dangerous act. Roland Barthes notes that in theater, characters who leave through a door often leave to their death. The potential of a door's usage is unlimited, yet doors are becoming more and more uncommon in live theater. The plays today without doors can have no definite end and leave the audience no feeling of finality. In television, doors are used to relate to the audience, to show that the setting shown in the black screen is similar to the one in which we live. In this way, today's television doors represent doors, while theater's doors represent a barrier to the unknown.

-Chris