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Regional Reviews: Washington, D.C. Grounded Also see Susan's review of Kid Victory Grounded is 70 minutes of mesmerizing theater that puts the viewer in the cockpit with an Air Force fighter pilot, experiencing both the exhilaration of flight and the emotional exhaustion of post-traumatic stress disorder. The one-woman drama by George Brant comes to the Mulitz-Gudelsky Theatre Lab at the Olney Theatre Center in the Maryland suburbs of Washington after a run at the Everyman Theatre in Baltimore. Megan Anderson is riveting as the unnamed Pilot who becomes an adrenaline junkie as she drops bombs on Afghan targets from her F-16 fighter plane. She's tough and totally confident, bragging and tossing back drinks with the men in her squadron. During a visit home, she meets a man who is frankly turned on by a woman who wears a flight suit, and that leads to an unexpected pregnancy and a change in her career plans. The Pilot can stay in the service, but she has to leave her plane and join the "Chair Force" as a drone pilot based outside Las Vegas. The bombs still fall in Afghanistan, she notes, but she is 8,000 miles away and "the threat of death has been removed." She drives to work at her base in the Nevada desert, spends 12 hours watching the shadowy gray images on the screen, then drives home to her husband and her sleeping daughter. She has the godlike ability to spot potential targets and rain down death upon them, but it's still shift work. As guided by director Derek Goldman, Anderson's performance is never showy for its own sake as the Pilot becomes consumed by the constant presence of surveillance in life—in the casino where her husband works, in the mall where she takes her daughter shopping—and her façade begins to crack. The physical production also helps draw the viewer into the Pilot's reality. Luciana Stecconi's scenic design consists largely of screens that project Jared Mezzocchi's projections: at first the dizzying blue of the sky, then the monochrome view through the drone cameras. Olney Theatre Center |
