http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/27/theater/anne-hathaways-solo-turn-as-a-fighter-pilot-in-grounded-at-the-public-theater.htmlTHEATERReview:
Anne Hathaway
as a Fighter Pilot in
‘Grounded’
at the Public TheaterNYT Critics’ Pick
By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
APRIL 26, 2015Here’s some unusual tabloid fodder:
Anne Hathaway has joined the Air Force!
Well, no, not really. But that Oscar-winning actor gives a fiercely good performance as a cocky pilot raining bombs down on Iraq and Afghanistan in the solo play
“Grounded,” by
George Brant. Nor is Ms. Hathaway the only A-lister involved in the production, which opened on Sunday at
the Public Theater. The show has been staged by
Julie Taymor, the Tony-winning film and theater director whose reputation has latterly been somewhat dented by the folly that was
“Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.”In its comparative simplicity and economy, “Grounded” could be seen as a departure of sorts for both artists. Ms. Hathaway is alone onstage for about 85 minutes, with scarcely a costume change, although Ms. Taymor has provided a sleek, high-tech production surrounding her. And while the material is not new — I reviewed an excellent smaller-scale production last year — Mr. Brant’s play draws a nuanced and haunting portrait of a woman serving in the United States Armed Forces coming under pressure as the human cost of war, for combatants as well as civilians, slowly eats away at her well-armored psyche.
The intriguing irony upon which the play rests is that Ms. Hathaway’s character, who remains unnamed, doesn’t begin to lose her steady grip on the righteousness of her work until she has been plucked from the sky, “the blue” as she calls it, in awe-struck, even worshipful tones. Early in the play, the pilot exudes a brash but not off-putting arrogance. Speaking of the pilot suit she’s earned, she says: “I never wanted to take it off. ... This was who I was now, who I’d become through sweat and brains and guts. This is me.”
She takes pride in just being one of the guys, and Ms. Hathaway, with her hair cropped short, a down-home twang in her voice and a masculine swagger in her stride, does indeed seem to be the kind of gal who would much rather be knocking back beers with her fellow pilots than, say, doing her nails. Home on leave in
Wyoming, she’s doing just that (the beer, not the nails) when she meets Eric, the rare man who isn’t put off by her choice of career.
“Most guys don’t like what I do,” she says bluntly, but with a mischievous sense of pleasure. “Feel they’re less of a guy around me. I take the guy spot, and they don’t know where they belong.”
But for Eric, who works in the family hardware store, a woman in macho pilot’s gear is a turn-on. (She agrees to have sex with the suit on, but only once.) And although her life has been bound up in her career — in that ecstatic communion with the sky — soon she finds herself unexpectedly attached. “First time I’m sad leave is over,” she notes. A few weeks later the real (metaphoric) bomb drops: She’s pregnant, and as a result, grounded. Working a desk job. “The pilot’s nightmare,” she says bitterly.
As Ms. Hathaway circles the small stage of the
Anspacher Theater, the only real prop on hand is a silver chair that descends (with rather unnecessary spectacle, actually) from the skies. It’s now from the safe, anonymous atmosphere of an armchair in a military facility in Las Vegas that this pilot will be “flying” — without leaving the ground, or getting even a glimpse of blue. She’ll be controlling the drones that are increasingly (and controversially) being used by the United States to wage war in the Middle East.
Our heroine doesn’t exactly leap for joy when she’s enlisted in what she derisively calls the “chair force.” But with a new baby and a new husband, she returns to duty, this time tracking bad guys in Afghanistan, for 12 hours a day, seven days a week. And there are compensations: “I will see my daughter grow up,” she says. “I will kiss my husband good night every night. No tracer fire. ...The threat of death has been removed.”
Those words come to take on a dark significance as the pilot becomes immersed in her new job. For while the threat of danger to herself has certainly evaporated, the responsibility of making life and death choices while waging war from an emotional distance begins to unsettle and unnerve her. “Grounded” implicitly suggests that engaging in combat from a place of relative safety may take just as harsh a psychological toll as traditional deployment.
For the first time we begin to hear hints of doubt and anxiety in Ms. Hathaway’s hitherto confident voice. Suddenly, hands that used to firmly grip the controls of a plane become sweaty on the joystick. With the high-definition video giving a precise picture of the havoc being wrought below, she can see the raw reality of the bomb blasts, as body parts fly up amid the wreckage. She’s also forced to watch American forces as they die, when the drones are required to linger over battle sites, “as one by one their bodies slowly turn the same gray as the sand.”
Some baggy or repetitive passages notwithstanding, Mr. Brant’s writing largely remains taut, terse and concentrated on exposing the fissures that open in the heroine’s confidence and sense of honor. Ms. Taymor and Ms. Hathaway allow the words to remain at the forefront of “Grounded,” even as we are also treated to impressive video displays that show us what the pilot sees as she stares into “the gray” of the desert for hours every day. (
Peter Nigrini’s projections play an integral role.) A tilted black glass wall at the back of the stage reflects the action, adding a ghostly dimension to the production that suggests the underside of what the pilot is experiencing: the gradual onset of something akin to post-traumatic stress disorder stealing upon her from behind.
Ms. Hathaway expertly delineates the gradual disintegration of her character’s equilibrium. In a particularly sharp passage, the pilot takes her daughter to the mall and finds herself unusually disturbed by the “little black circle in the corner of the wall,” a surveillance camera that no longer seems a harmless device to her. “There’s always a camera, right? J. C. Penney or Afghanistan. Everything is witnessed.”
The show’s final passages veer into rather too portentous and highfalutin territory, as the pilot stares us down and intones darkly, “You who watch me and think you are safe, know this, know that you are not safe.” Still, the point isn’t an outrageous stretch: “Grounded” has a grimly fresh topicality, with
President Obama recently addressing the issue of the dangers of war by drone after an American and an Italian hostage were accidentally killed in a strike in January.
And you get a chill hearing those words spoken by Ms. Hathaway in a voice both harsh and deadened, the eager enthusiasm in her character’s eyes having been extinguished by all those days of staring into the gray anonymity of the deserts, where men, women and even children can die at the push of a button thousands of miles away.
GroundedBy George Brant; directed by Julie Taymor; music and soundscapes by Elliot Goldenthal; sets by Riccardo Hernandez; lighting by Christopher Akerlind; sound by Will Pickens; projections by Peter Nigrini; electronic music by Richard Martinez; production stage manager, Evangeline Rose Whitlock; associate artistic director, Mandy Hackett; associate producer, Maria Goyanes; production executive, Ruth E. Sternberg. Presented by the Public Theater, Oskar Eustis, artistic director; Patrick Willingham, executive director. At the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, at Astor Place, East Village; 212-967-7555, publictheater.org. Through May 24. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes.
WITH: Anne Hathaway (the Pilot).www.publictheater.org/