Camelot Theatre's production of The Manchurian Candidate explores the exhibitionist and exploitive
ontology of the pleasure taken in the vicarious experience of violence through
war news on the part of Jackson County and communities like it that exist on
the periphery of the United States' imperialist agenda.
By telling the story as a juxtaposition between live theater
directed by Roy Von Rains, Jr., and videography by Brian O'Connor, The Manchurian Candidate casts journalistic
depictions of violence as specious accounts based upon likely events that
primarily serve to sate the consumers' bloodthirsty appetites. Since American
consumers equal American voters, war journalism serves to entrench power in a
the hands of antisocial hawks.
Camelot's production begins with a video account of a UN
peacekeeping platoon's capture by an unidentified foe in Kuwait. The
story cuts to a staged homecoming event for Raymond Shaw (Aaron Garber), a
survivor of the ill-fated platoon and stepson to Republican Senator Johnny
Iselin (Jeff Golden). Iselin uses the event as
a campaign stump. Through fellow survivor Ben Marco's (Mark Schneider)
videographed dream sequence, we learn that Shaw could have been brainwashed to
act as a sleeper agent for an unknown entity. Also likely, these dreams can
easily be chalked up to his untreated PTSD. The story, staged and videographed,
follows Iselin and his wife's (Presila Quinby)
rise to power, and Marco's struggle to unravel the mystery of Raymond Shaw.
Camelot explores our relationship to fictional and
documentary violence as an event wherein "fictional" and
"documentary" aren't, at least for the consumer, entirely distinct.
By focusing heavily on depictions of violence often similar to those in
fictional videography and film, journalism's violent focus serves prurient,
rather than educational, purposes. In a community like Jackson
County, geographically distinct from
high-violence regions like current war-zones, such depictions are exhibitionist
to the benefit of distant power struggles in Washington, and exploit actual victims and
perpetrators of violence. O'Connor's contributions, as Video Designer, take
primacy in this story. By staging artificial and intimate footage of war
stories, from brainwashing to PTSD, O'Connor comments upon the insincerity of
such footage as it's usually seen in Jackson
County: broadcast and
internet journalism. In using stage, a medium wherein artifice is acknowledged
and accepted, as the venue wherein to present his videos, O'Connor comments
upon the artifice inherent to video-journalism, a medium wherein acknowledged
artifice is equated with failure. O'Connor, as the primary artist in this Manchurian Candidate, levels a critique
at our relationship with journalistic war stories.
As described by Camelot's Manchurian Candidate, the relationship of Americans living outside
sites of power and/or sites of violence with journalistic depictions of
violence is defined by exhibitionism on the part of those in power, and
exploitation of those actually experiencing the depicted violence. It's a
particularly appropriate description during a post-9/11 election cycle.
O'Connor, as the de facto primary artist in this production, uses his new-media
stage-craft to its fullest extent to level this critique so tactfully that it
reads as stupefying Aristotelean coercion, as opposed to a more pedantic
Brechtian A-effect. While potentially soporific, this approach seems to best
fit the overall story that O'Connor is telling: like Bill Watterson says, Marx
only called religion the opiate of the masses because he'd never watched TV.
