The Pilot, the only person we see on the Everyman Theatre stage in George Brant's play, "Grounded," is a macho, hard-drinking, AC/DC-listening soldier who relishes sexual conquests as much as battlefield triumphs. You know the type. But maybe you don't know the type as a woman.
The Pilot, the only name she's given in the script, is played by Megan Anderson, a short, wiry woman in a shag haircut, green flight suit and laced-up combat boots. Yet when she talks about dropping bombs from her fighter jet on Persian minarets, you can sense the adrenaline pleasure coursing through her veins. She delivers her monologues from a combative stance, legs planted slightly apart, one foot in front of the other, chin thrust forward.
On leave back home in Wyoming, she visits the local bar and allows Eric, who works in his family's hardware store, to pick her up. After one bout of sex, he asks her to put her flight suit back on. It turns him on; that turns her on, and the second round is even better than the first.
It also makes her pregnant, which causes her to lose the only job she's ever wanted. She takes three years off to get her daughter Samantha past her second birthday, but she then returns to active duty and asks for her old job back. Her commander replies that fighter jets are the past; drones are the future, and he orders her to report for assignment as a drone pilot.
Soon Anderson is seated in the same black swivel chair that had served as her jet cockpit. This time, though, she is surrounded not by slides of blue sky and clouds but by video screens filled with gray images of Middle Eastern desert. She is sitting not in a plane but in an air-conditioned trailer outside Las Vegas, handling the steering and throttle of a drone high in the sky over Afghanistan.
At first the gig seems like a good deal for the mother of a young child. Instead of coming home once a year, she comes home every night. She commutes to war. But soon the job seems alienating in a way her old job never was. Other voices are constantly in her headset, telling her which way to go. Because the drone can stay aloft for 40 hours at a time, the missions never seem to end. She begins to feel like a cog in a machine rather than a warrior atop a horse.
This alienation is reinforced at Everyman by designer Luciana Stecconi's wall of video monitors and slide screens, which allow the hypnotic gray of the Pilot's monitor to multiply and envelop the audience member in the furthest row just as the close-up screen envelops the Pilot. The blurry images are more suggestive than definitive, creating the sense that we're looking for something we can't quite pin down—just as the Pilot is.
The alienation is also reinforced by Anderson's physical cues. The bold assertiveness of her early gestures gradually give way to squirming shoulders and fists clenched in frustration. When the Pilot goes home, Anderson's face lights up when she greets her daughter, dims when she sinks into exhaustion, and darkens when she argues with her husband. This uneasiness sets up a terrific climax.
Brant's script seems to suggest that drones are somehow more immoral than bomber jets, though that seems more an emotional response than a rational analysis. There's no discussion of why killing at close range is better than killing at the long range of a jet or the longer range of a drone. Brant introduces a field of homemade white crosses in the Nevada desert, but this metaphoric conceit is poorly set up and doesn't pay off.
This is not a play, however, for elucidating the morality and politics of modern warfare; it's a play for understanding the felt experience of a soldier caught in an increasingly technological war machine. And that aspect is communicated quite powerfully.
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Even though the Pilot is the only person we see on stage, Brant's monologues, Derek Goldman's direction, and Anderson's acting evoke several other vivid characters: Eric, Samantha, various superior officers. Anderson speaks in their voices and then reacts as the Pilot as if surprised by what she just heard. We are constantly surprised ourselves, and that's always a good sign.
