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 intense and intimate solo play Grounded follows one woman’s shift from hot-shot fighter pilot to a member of what she dismisses as the “Chair Force”: flying unmanned aerial vehicles in a windowless trailer in the Nevada desert, driving home to her husband and young daughter, trying to absorb the pixelated images from the belly of the Reaper drone she pilots from across the world. In examining the circumstances of a single pilot, Brant also considers the transformation of the contemporary military: from the danger (and ego boost) of the cockpit of an F-16—along with the combat zone’s camaraderie and rituals of decompression—to the experience of warfare as shift work, both more estranged from the battlefield and more intimately connected to the people that pilots and their teams can spend weeks tracking.
The Pilot’s language is both straightforward and unnervingly lyrical, shuttling the audience from descriptions of bringing her beloved F-16 up into the sky to the thrill of being trusted with her $11 million drone to moments of connection with her husband or young daughter—as well as the midzone gaze of her twelve-hour shift or the aerial view she imagines of her own car driving home through a different greyed-out desert.
The physical production that director Christopher Haydon has developed with his designers is likewise stark, evocative, and transformational. In an echo of the elegance and directness of Brant’s language, the production sets the pilot in a white scrim cube, suggesting images of sky and desert and screens as her world shifts from blue to grey, distant to surprisingly intimate. The multimedia frame simultaneously demonstrates the Pilot’s expansive gaze and puts her on specimen-specific display.
From the Pilot’s growing sense of herself as both all-seeing and always surveilled, Grounded builds a story of the ways technology has changed the rules of military engagement and psychological disengagement, of how civilians and military alike negotiate shifting boundaries of war zones and battlefields, and of the ways that at least one pilot finds herself renegotiating the very meaning of her identity as a member of the armed forces.