The Source

Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning has many identities: adrift adolescent, emboldened whistleblower, traitor to her country. In this penetrating music-theater work, composer Ted Hearne and director Daniel Fish dive into the media hysteria responsible for the many faces of the Army private who infamously leaked hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks.

An ever shifting chorus of silent witnesses looms (on large format video) as four singers descend into the digital mire. With computer-processed voices, they inhabit a fever-dream assemblage of Twitter feeds, cable news reports, chat transcripts, court testimony and declassified military video, asking how we, as individuals and a nation, confront the massive information which Manning brought to light.