Grounded?
By The nameless heroine of George Brant’s Grounded has a schedule many working mothers will recognise. She wakes up, takes her daughter to daycare, goes to her job, comes home, eats dinner with her husband, watches TV and falls asleep. Here’s the twist: the woman is a fighter pilot, and her job entails dropping missiles on military-age males, thousands of miles away. Every day, she sits in a chair at a Nevada airforce base and remotely controls a drone aircraft.
Brant’s monologue, which was seen in Edinburgh in 2013 and off-Broadway in 2014, is back, with a rather more famous figure filling out the flight suit: the Hollywood star Anne Hathaway, who pursued the role after reading a review of an earlier production. She approached Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public theater, and he teamed her with Julie Taymor (of Lion King fame and Spider-Man infamy). This production, unnervingly gorgeous and overwrought, considers the costs of fighting a foreign war from home.
Gotta get a quote from Hathaway…