Theatre in Review: Grounded (The Public Theater)

	Anne Hathaway. Photo: Joan Marcus

Anyone who reads Lighting&Sound America knows about the enormous advances that have been made in video technology. Projectors become brighter by the month. LED screens offer higher and higher resolutions. Pixel-mapping allows one to spread images across greater, and more unusually shaped, surfaces. Designers are making enormously creative use of these technologies, in ways that would have been impossible only a few years ago. But, in some instances, there is the danger that video will become the whole show.

Consider the case of Grounded. George Brant's play is a taut solo drama about a female Air Force pilot, who, following a series of major life changes -- including marriage and the birth of a daughter -- gets reassigned to the "chair force," operating drones by remote control from a building in the Nevada desert. (While she has been away from the service, military priorities have changed; fighter pilots are out, drones are in.) Sitting there, 12 hours a day, seven days a week, she peers into a screen, looking for evidence of human movements on the other side of the world.

At first, the character, known only as The Pilot, feels imprisoned in her new desk job. She has spoken lyrically about her almost spiritual fascination with flight. Employing the eloquent blank verse that makes up the script of Grounded, she describes the experience of hurtling through space: "You are the blue/You are alone in the vastness and you are the blue/Astronauts/They have eternity/But I have color/I have blue." Still, for the first time, she can enjoy family life -- and, after years of flying and going out for drinks with the guys, she is stunned to discover how much her husband and daughter mean to her. And technology has a transformative effect on her work: As a pilot, she dropped bombs from on high, separated from her handiwork by tens of thousands of feet; sitting in the drone hut, serving as "the eye in the sky," she has a close-up view and enjoys a real satisfaction at "hunting down the bad guys, conducting personality strikes." She presses a button and, 1.2 seconds later, someone dies in a desert on another continent.

The thrill quickly fades, however, as the job begins to eat away at her. She becomes impossible at home, tearing her family apart with her rages and depressions. ("It'd be a different book if Odysseus came home every day," she notes.) She becomes obsessed with the surveillance aspects of modern life, experiencing a panic attack in a shopping mall filled with security cameras. (Eric, her husband, works as a dealer at a Vegas casino; he, too, is constantly under watch, to prevent cheating.) She all but unravels when assigned to a long-term hunt for a high-value target, following him closely for days, her nerves stretched to the breaking point. Increasingly unable to distinguish between her work and personal live, she makes a snap judgment that proves successful in terms of her work, but which has a soul-destroying effect.

It's a tribute to Brant's skill as a playwright that Anne Hathaway, who plays The Pilot, delivers a thoroughly valid performance that differs sharply from that of the great Hannah Cabell, who, last year, appeared in Grounded at Page 73 Productions. Cabell began with a certain amount of swagger and gradually imploded, becoming so intently focused that you hung on every word. Hathaway begins in a similar place but lets her fury boil over; she prowls the stage restlessly, looking for an outlet for her rage and finding none. It's a much more exterior performance, but no less disciplined. When she finds herself unexpectedly choking back tears, her despair is heartbreaking, and she when exits at the end, her military bearing is unchanged but there is little doubt that she is broken inside.

The actress' work would be even more remarkable if she wasn't forced to battle the production design every step of the way. The director, Julie Taymor, has overseen an approach that, initially, seems intriguing. Riccardo Hernandez's set covers the deck with ripples of sand; upstage is a sharply angled wall made up of some kind of reflective material. It appears to be just the austere environment this powerful play requires. But both the floor and wall are used as surfaces for Peter Nigrini's stunning, but overwhelming, imagery. When The Pilot describes the experience of flying, we are sent hurtling into a blue void. When she drives to work in Nevada, the actress stands in the middle of a similarly high-velocity image of a traveling highway. When The Pilot moves to Vegas, the entire playing space becomes the surface of a one-armed bandit. When operating the drone, she sits in the middle of an enormous rendering of the images on her screen. Most of these projections are accompanied by Will Pickens' sound effects, ranging from the jangle of a casino to Elvis Presley singing "Viva Las Vegas" to the voice of The Pilot's daughter to the whoosh of a plane racing through the sky. When these aren't enough, there is also an electronic music score by Richard Martinez. The most subtle design element is Christopher Akerlind's lighting, which necessarily takes a back seat to the video -- like everything else in the play.

This is nothing against Nigrini, a fine designer, who, after all, is only doing what his director wants. And there are moments when the design pays off. The strangely silent explosions caused by the press of a button speak volumes about the disconnected nature of this kind of work. When Eric creates a mixtape designed to allow The Pilot to unwind on the way home from work, Pickens let us feel the music's visceral impact. A little bit of everything that Taymor's team has provided would go a long way toward realizing the full power of Grounded.

Sadly, however, there is a drastic oversupply of everything. Despite her compelling presence and her skill at capturing the warring emotions inside The Pilot's heart, it is impossible for Hathaway to stand up to such overpowering imagery. Time and again, the actress' work is interrupted by visual and sound effects; you have to catch her between cues. And there are times when she simply disappears into the son et lumière show unfolding around her. There is a deeper failure of the imagination here: Brant's script is so vividly imagined that the words alone allow us to conjure The Pilot's world; Ken Rus Schmoll's production for Page 73 Productions proved that. At the Public, Taymor and company provide an illustration for every image or idea in the script. When The Pilot first meets Eric in the bar, a montage of neon cocktail lounge signs is seen on the stage. When she goes to the mall, the stage is covered in an Escher-like representation of escalators. When, during a scene at home, her little daughter clutches her pink pony, the deck is covered with.....you guessed it. The constant attempts at hyping every moment become wearing and more than a little infantilizing; it betrays a lack of confidence in the script -- and the audience. After a while, I felt that I was watching Grounded for Dummies.

Speaking to the New York Times about Grounded, Taymor said, "I'm known for spectacle, and there is a derogatory attitude in that sentence. In the world of France, 'spectacle' is theater, le spectacle. Spectacle in our culture takes second place to the spoken word. And that is a big mistake. It's not spectacle as in Barnum and Bailey spectacle. It's there to give theatrical depth." Maybe, but the French have another word, "drame," which implies tragedy (which Grounded surely is) and which connotes a certain austerity of presentation. In its bleak poetry and interiority, Grounded has an almost neo-classic quality, and it's hard to imagine a French director subjecting it to the visual and aural overload seen at the Public.

It all depends on what one sees as the foundation of the theatre. To my mind, the text is the thing -- first, last, and always. Design is there to serve the text, to set the tone, to help tease out its meanings, and to provide a suitable environment for the actors. When design takes over, the theatrical event is fatally compromised. The audience no longer needs to use its imagination; it can sit there passively, while the visual and aural effects do all the work. In a way, I'm grateful to have seen Grounded, for it provides an excellent case study. Taymor's production has its share of powerful moments, but it isn't a patch on the version done at Walkerspace for probably a tenth of the cost. All it had was a script with something to say and a brilliant actress; the funny thing is, it was more than enough. -- David Barbour