Theatre in Review: Grounded (Page 73 Productions at Walkerspace)

	Hannah Cabell. Photo: Rob Strong

An Air Force pilot's life unravels in Grounded, a work of rare immediacy that dares to examine one of the uglier facts of life in the modern security state. Known only as The Pilot, she describes her career -- flying an F16 on reconnaissance and bombing missions in the Middle East -- in exalted terms. "Astronauts have eternity, but I have the blue," she says, by way of saying that her happiest times have been spent cruising tens of thousands of feet in the air. One of the boys among her colleagues, she also enjoys the camaraderie and the drinking. Dating, she admits, is a tricky proposition, her achievements having an undermining effect on many men. "I take the guy's spot, and they don't know where they belong," she explains.

Her life undergoes profound changes when a pickup turns into a weekend-long tryst and then a more serious relationship. The guy, Eric, has a mundane day job in retail but isn't threatened by her career. When she becomes pregnant and he proposes marriage, she finds herself for the first time considering the possibility of domestic happiness. However, pregnant pilots are barred from flying, and she ends up a desk jockey, a less welcome development.

Still, all goes well for a few years, until she decides a life on the ground only will no longer do. With Eric's encouragement, she reapplies to be a pilot and is accepted. During her time off, the job has changed drastically, however. With the U.S. pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan, F16s are a thing of the past; drones are the order of the day. To her surprise and chagrin, she is now a pilot in the "chair force," sitting in the Nevada desert, watching a screen and guiding an automated plane -- "a bird with no eyes" -- with a joystick. "I will be in the war out of Las Vegas," she notes, with some disgust.

The playwright, George Brant, is particularly strong on the strange details of The Pilot's new job. She spends her 12-hour days staring at a screen that shows "a road that is 12 hours ahead and 1.2 seconds away," the latter figure denoting the amount of time it would take for her to drop a bomb should a high-value target be spotted. But life among the "drone gods" begins to have a coruscating effect; at first, her inability to decompress, her sudden rages, her remoteness at home are treated as inevitable side effects of a singular job. "It would be a different book if Odysseus came home every day," she notes.

Further, having traded the exhilaration and freedom of flying for a sense of confinement as she spies on figures half a world away, she points out that living under observation is a necessary fact of modern life. Eric, who works as a dealer in a casino, "has his own eye in the sky," as he is under constant surveillance by security guards looking for cheaters. And, yes, we live in a world where the very notion of privacy may be going the way of the dodo. "J. C. Penney or Afghanistan; everything is witnessed," she adds, as anyone who has made a purchase at Target recently now realizes.

Things really start to go sour when The Pilot is assigned to the hunt for Number 2, a highly placed terrorist suggestive of Ayman Al-Zawahiri. She spends whole days peering into her screen, following a van, waiting for the rider to step outside so he may be identified and the order given to kill him. By now, the accumulated stress is eating away at her soul. She may have spread destruction from the air in her previous career, but now the experience of keeping tabs on real human beings proves more than she can handle. She becomes a monster at home, frightening her daughter with her outbursts and savaging her husband with her rages. When the hunt reaches its climactic moment, fate throws her a curveball, and she makes a snap decision that will destroy her career.

Grounded is not an in-depth discussion of the NSA-determined world in which we live, and early on it becomes pretty clear where the story is headed. But Brant is the first playwright in my experience to tackle this subject matter, and he brings a fresh eye to the subject, suggesting that some of the biggest casualties of war never get near a battlefield. And in The Pilot he has created a notably compelling character. Hannah Cabell, always a solid actress, proves to be a commanding one here, as her early swagger and self-confidence slips away, sending her tumbling into a private hell. We see her surprised by joy in love and family life, adding extra power to her mounting anguish and fury. The director, Ken Rus Schmoll, ensures that Cabell's performance maintain a laser-like focus for the 70-minute running time.

Grounded is not an elaborate production, but the set, by Arnulfo Maldonado (who also did the single costume), features an interesting ground plan, with The Pilot placed on a narrow strip of stage backed by a thin, horizontal, curving cyc in the distance. The latter is treated with a blue wash by the lighting designer, Garin Marschall, to suggest the color of the sky that The Pilot loves so well. Jane Shaw's sound design also supplies a number of key effects.

A fictional piece, Grounded has a kind of documentary immediacy that raises many questions about the price we pay in safeguarding ourselves from terrorism. New kinds of war produce new kinds of scars that are no less devastating for being internal. It is Brant's achievement that he embodies these terrible ironies in the sad tale of The Pilot's reckoning with our new penchant for murder by remote control.--David Barbour