WAR: THEN AND NOW
Grounded
By George Brant I Directed by Dawn McAndrews
When an American fighter pilot becomes unexpectedly pregnant, she is reassigned to operate military drones from a windowless trailer outside Las Vegas. By day, she hunts terrorists. By night, she enjoys a quiet family life in suburbia. As the pressure to track a high-profile target mounts, the boundaries begin to blur between the desert where she lives and the one she patrols half a world away.
Recommended for Ages 16+
Cast
From the Director
It would be a different book
The Odyssey
If Odysseus came home every day
Every single day
A very different book
—The Pilot, Grounded
George Brant’s intimate solo play Grounded follows one woman’s journey from hot-shot F-16 fighter pilot to a member of what she dismissively terms “the Chair Force;” flying unmanned aerial vehicles in a windowless trailer in the Nevada desert, driving home to her husband and young daughter every single day from “The War.” Through the Pilot’s growing sense of herself as all-seeing and always surveilled, Grounded explores the ways technology has changed the rules of engagement, of how civilians and military negotiate shifting boundaries of battlefields and personal identity.
The inspiration for Brant’s play came from a photograph showing a fighter pilot in her mid-to-late thirties. She’s in her flight suit, carrying a helmet. She stares down the lens without smiling, both assertive and at ease, but the first thing you notice is her belly. Her suit’s open and she’s pregnant. Her bump is the same shape as her helmet. Brant had needed an “in,” a figure to embody the dilemmas drones posed. As he says, “it’s very hard to write a machine as a protagonist.” The image helped the play fall into place.
On choosing this play for our (R)evolutionary Redux Season, I was looking for ways to honor veterans and their experiences; in part, I was looking for stories that explored the experience of war. I’m a parent of two young men who have grown up in a country continuously at war somewhere in the world, and sometimes closer to home. The war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on democracy, this is the state of our world. The two plays of our Fall Show, WAR THEN AND NOW, through the words of The Poet in An Iliad and The Pilot in Grounded, weave an experience of war through the centuries and its very real consequences—both large and small.