No Good Men in Oklahoma

When it comes to nationalism, there are no white hats.

Oklahoma!, now playing at Camelot Theatre through January 10th, uses Jud the creep as a foil for Curly the hero. It fails, however, to present Curly as a morally unambiguous protagonist. Instead, the only meaningful difference between the two is that Curly's chauvinism is accepted by their community.

Oklahoma! follows the courtship of Curly (Nathan Monks) and Laurey (Grace Peets) in post-Sooner/pre-state Oklahoma. Curly's desirability is supposed to be set in relief by the sexually aggressive loner Jud (Aaron Garber). Curly and Laurey, like Benedick and Beatrice, are attracted to each other but make a point of pride not to admit it. Everyone knows they like each other though: Aunt Eller (Linda Otto) suggests that Curly "just grab her and kiss her when she talks to [him] like that" after Laurey rebuffs him in the opening scene. The play begins in anticipation of a box social, in which women will be auctioned off to the men by proxy of the lunches they make. To jerk Curly's chain, Laurey agrees to go to the box social with Jud. In a member-measuring scene, Curly visits Jud in his shed and suggests he kill himself in "Pore Jud Is Dead," predicated by nothing but Jud's asking Laurey out on a date. Laurey has second thoughts after reflecting on the porn that Jud keeps pinned to the walls in the shed where he lives. Her cold feet come to a climax with a ballet sequence, choreographed by Rebecca Campbell, in which Jud rapes her and kills Curly when the latter comes to her rescue. Tensions rise between the two men in waking life as Curly moves in on Laurey, and her fears about Jud begin to come true with regards to his sexual aggression.

Curly, at least in this Oklahoma!, is morally ambivalent. While he is better than the morally turpitudinous Jud, he still engages in sexually possessive behavior towards Laurey even when she tells him "no." Rather than presenting a White Knight - or, since this is the West, a White Hat - Oklahoma! asks us what exactly differentiates Curly and Jud. The best answer it presents is that, ultimately, Curly is a native member of the community, while Jud came from elsewhere. In that sense, Curly's chauvinism is accepted and shared by the community, while Jud's represents a foreign threat. Their chauvinism is intimately related to the word's nationalistic roots: we can't forget that this story is built upon incipient statehood and patriotic excitement. Oklahoma! levels a candied critique at the chauvinistic identity of nationalism.

Curly may be better than Jud, but he's no good guy. He encourages his rival to commit suicide, apropos of nothing but juvenile jealousy, and ultimately kills Jud, committing the only homicide in a play that otherwise never crosses into bloody violence even while being on the verge of doing so. Curly's specific moral ambiguity reflects universally upon the moral ambiguity of nationalism. The effectiveness of this subtle critique is primarily indebted to Monks and Garber. Monks matches his charisma as an actor with an unsettling earnestness in recommending that Jud hang himself, and Garber plays a Jud who's simmering sexual frustration is ready to boil over at any moment.

Camelot Theatre and the Bloody Politic

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.