Sand covers the stage as well, in a deliberately disorienting set designed by Riccardo Hernandez. In the very first moment in her “Grounded,” a steady stream of (what we eventually learn is) sand pours very slowly from the ceiling onto Anne Hathaway’s helmet, ominously lit by Christopher Akerlind. At one point in that production, Puck seemed to pour himself slowly from the ceiling. There are moments here that recall Taymor’s eye-catching production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which inaugurated the Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center two years ago. drone policy and practice than with issues that are as much cultural as political, all worth contemplating – the psychological effect that such remote-control killing has on individual members of the armed forces, the rise of a surveillance culture in daily life, the loss of privacy.īut Hathaway’s performance and Brant’s script seem themselves nearly grounded in order to allow Julie Taymor her flight into visual spectacle. The way she adjusts worries her supportive husband – and the audience as well.īrant’s script seems less concerned with specific U.S. She is not happy – she derides her new role as being stuck in the “Chair Force” – but she adjusts. She and her boyfriend get married, she gives birth – but when she returns to work, she is informed she will be reassigned to operate military drones from a windowless trailer outside Las Vegas. “Driving to war like it’s shift work, like I’m punching the clock,” she says. But then, as she tells us, she meets a civilian, they have a one-night stand and fall in love she gets pregnant, which means she’s “grounded”: The military forbids pregnant women from flying. She tells us how she loved everything about her job, from the poetry of flight –“You are alone in the vastness and you are the blue” – to the macho camaraderie of a pilot bar, where she could “drink with my boys” and tell stories about flying. Hathaway is fine as the initially cocky unnamed ace fighter pilot, who becomes credibly unmoored as the show progresses. Yet, it’s my guess I would have liked “Grounded” better in almost any of its other productions. The production at the Public is undoubtedly the highest profile, featuring both a major movie star and one of the best-known theater directors in the world. Since it debuted two years ago, George Brant’s one-character play has been produced in theaters all over the United States (including last year in Tribeca) and as far away as New Zealand there are more than a half dozen opening just within the next few weeks in places like Portland and Wappingers Falls and South Brisbane. drone strike accidentally killed an American aid worker held hostage by Al Qaeda, which brought to public consciousness once again, as one news report put it, “the perils of a largely invisible, long-distance war waged through video screens, joysticks and sometimes incomplete intelligence.” “Grounded,” a play directed by Julie Taymor and starring Anne Hathaway as a drone pilot, could not be more newsworthy: It is opening at the Public Theater just days after the news that a U.S.
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