Arnold Aronson Their Exits and Their Entrances : Getting a Handle on Doors

popular culture of the 1990s came, of course, from television: Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment door bursting open, with Kramer grasping the doorknob and sliding into the room as if the door were dragging him by its own sheer will. A manic force was thrust, as if from some other cosmic sphere, into the relatively calm, if absurd, world of Jerry Seinfeld. This is a comic rhythm we know well from more than half a century of television sitcoms: Ed Norton, only slightly less antic than Kramer, invading the phlegmatic arena of Ralph Kramden in the 1950s The Honeymooners, or the deceptively benign Ethel Mertz (a sly reference to Kurt Schwitters’s branch of Dada perhaps?) apprehensively opening the door to Lucy’s frenzied domain from I Love Lucy of the same era. In the world of sitcoms, but equally true in drama since ancient times, the door is a barrier: a bulwark against the chaos that lurks just beyond. But it is an easily transgressed border, and the forces of disorder slip in with ease to disrupt the illusory status quo. At the end of each episode, harmony and balance are temporarily and tentatively restored; the door is closed again until next week and the homes and lives of the characters are left in fragile limbo. Our stages, our movies, our television shows, depict rooms with doors; characters come and go, opening and closing doors, and yet we rarely notice unless the action is intended to draw attention to itself: a character makes a broad comic entrance; someone hides behind a door; a squeaking door induces terror. What is theatre, after all, if not a series of exits and entrances? The word ‘enter’ may be the commonest word in a commedia dell’arte scenario – for the plays were essentially a series of comings and goings, making the text a catalogue of doors, as it were. The word ‘exeunt’ marks the rhythm of Shakespeare, and when Antigonus ‘exits pursued by a bear’ he does so, even on the Shakespearean stage, through a door. The door marks a beginning and an end; it punctuates comings and goings. Similarly, the fundamental language of computers is a binary one consisting of zeros and ones: a digital doorway is open or closed.