Grounded

Photo: Sara Krulwich

A 2011 one-character play about a fighter pilot who transitions from combat to an assignment on an Army base as a drone pilot, Grounded, by George Brant, has been produced around the country and last ran in New York in January 2014. As Charles Isherwood's review of that production points out, the show examines the life of one woman facing "particular traumas," but "ultimately doesn't provide much fodder for larger reflections on American foreign policy or the changing mores of a changing military." An interesting profile of one woman's descent into severe PTSD, the production at the Public nevertheless doesn't pack quite the punch I wished it would.

Anne Hathaway plays a nameless, swaggering, aggressively unsentimental fighter pilot, who loves being in the air--the blue--more than anything else. She brags at the beginning of the show about her speed, stealth, and ability to drop bombs on suspicious "military-age males" from miles above. One evening, while drinking with the fellas while home on leave, she meets a man, Eric, who doesn't flinch at her tough demeanor or feel threatened by the traditionally macho work she does. She takes him home for a weekend of what confides is enormously satisfying sex. When she realizes, after redeployment, that she's pregnant (she intuits that it's a girl), she reluctantly takes leave, because as much as she loves the blue, she just "can't kill her"--and also, she's in love. After marrying Eric and giving birth to Samantha, she is reassigned to what she sneeringly refers to as the "chair force": a team of trained pilots who work out of a trailer on an Army base in Las Vegas, directing drones to drop bombs on targets thousands of miles away. While skeptical and unhappy at the thought of sitting and staring at a computer screen for 12-hour shifts instead of taking to the skies, she finds some comfort in the fact that she doesn't have to separate from her family, and that the threat of her own injury or death no longer exists.

Is Julie Taymor right for Grounded?

So, suddenly there's an announcement. Julie Taymor. Anne Hathaway. Grounded. Tickets already on sale, and going fast.

Anne Hathaway
Vivien Killilea/Getty Images for Psiff

It's my turn to order tickets, so I check the available dates. I have a subscription to the Public with three other people, plus another friend has asked to join us. In short order, we are down to only a dozen possible dates. I go to the Public and wait 25 minutes as the one person in line ahead of me asks a million questions, and not particularly politely.

Grounded is at the Anspacher. After spending close to 3 hours looking at people's butts during the Normal Heart, I will no longer sit on the side there.

So I go into negotiations with the amazingly patient box office guy, and my friends and I end up with 5 out of 6 of the left box seats for a Saturday matinee, despite our general aversion to Saturday matinees.

The Best of 2014

Rebekah Brockman, Tom Pecinka
in Arcadia
Photo: Joan Marcus

Aaah, the joys of being an online reviewer. I don't get paid, and I often have to buy my own tickets, but I don't have to see shows that don't interest me. This may be why I always have robust "best of" lists--I'm choosing among shows I was predisposed to like. This doesn't mean I love everything. I saw some serious stinkers this year (Your Mother's Version of the Kama Sutra, Architecture of Becoming, Nothing on Earth (Can Hold Houdini), Bullets Over Broadway, Intimacy). But on a whole, I had a very exciting year in the theatre.

Asymmetric

Is all really fair in love and war? Not according to the thriller-comedy-love-story-political-commentary Asymmetric, written by the wonderful Mac Rogers, directed by the also wonderful Jordana Williams, and produced by Group UP and Gideon Productions at 59E59. 

Sean Williams, Kate Middleton, Seth Shelden
Photo: Deborah Alexander

As political commentary, Asymmetric offers a fascinating and important debate about the idea of "us" versus "them," with one character viewing "us" as the United States, our people, our guys, and the other viewing "us" as the human race, with no "them." I am struck by the fact that Rogers uses a woman character to embrace humanity and turn against drones and killing, despite (because of?) her previous close relationship with human destruction. Rogers is the second playwright this year to have a tough woman fight the idea of raining death down from the sky, and I have the same questions I discussed in that review (Grounded by George Brant):

... I wonder, does Brant believe that women, ... feel sympathy/compassion differently/more than men do? Is [the main character] supposed to be unique or representative? Or both? Would Grounded be the same if it were about a father rather than a mother? Men and women can be so different and yet so similar....