The Eye in the Sky

Grounded at the Public Theater

Anne Hathaway in Grounded.

            In Grounded, a play by David Grant now playing at the Public Theater through May 24^th, Anne Hathaway plays a fighter pilot whose jargon and cockiness is almost irritating (although maybe that’s just Anne Hathaway).  Unusually for one-woman shows that don’t have the words “My So-Called Life” or “And I’m in Therapy” in the title, Hathaway’s character—identified only as “The Pilot”—seems almost to be aware of being watched by an audience.  She tries from the very beginning to put on a show about her worthiness as a bomber in the Air Force, a job in which, apparently, the bombing itself seems almost to be a side note.  The real allure is “the blue,” as she calls it (a little too often), the freedom and solitude of the sky.  The “boom,” when Iraqi troops and facilities are blasted off the face of the earth below her, comes later, when she’s already far, far away.

            The Pilot is a country girl, Wyoming born and bred, and she likes to “knock back a beer” with her “boys”—other Air Force.  One night, while this is in process, she’s approached by a hardware store manager named Eric, who finds her suit and her job as appealing as she does.  They copulate, then fall in love, possibly in that order, though the Pilot is so self-involved it’s almost difficult to tell.

            Just when the Pilot’s brassy cocksure attitude is beginning to grate, she finds herself pregnant with Eric’s child, and is summarily grounded by her commander.  She and Eric marry, but she gets restless and needs to go back to the “blue” again.  But when she reports for duty, it’s revealed she’s been reassigned—to what pilots call the “Chair Force,” or the drone pilots who serve twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week, in trailers at the Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.  Plucked from the sky she loves, she, Eric, and their daughter Sam pull up roots, and suddenly, she’s a drone pilot, with all the psychological contradictions that entails.  Things begin to get interesting.

            The play is a masterpiece, which is difficult to say of any one-person show because they’re so inherently subjective and in dialogue with their audience, and so can’t exist as paragons of creativity on their own.  But as a piece of writing, a 75-minute monologue that perfectly captures this country’s attitudes toward war while simultaneously existing as a diverting, deliciously ambiguous play, Grounded cements Mr. Grant as a talent to watch.  His foreshadowing, in hindsight, is crystalline in its perfection, and the story barrels forward with all the freedom of an F-16.

            The trouble with Anne Hathaway as an actress—I like her fine, but she’s widely and almost reflexively reviled—is that her acting style is that of a first-year drama student who’s desperately trying to act as if she’s coming up with the script off the top of her head.  She stutters where there need be no stutters, gets quieter and louder without any discernible reason for doing so, trails off during innocuous sentences, and has a habit of throwing back her hands like Billy Crystal at the Oscars, or Roy Scheider in All That Jazz.  And these characteristics, which are distracting but not, frankly, entirely unpleasant, are indeed prevalent in the run-up to the Pilot’s assignment to Creech.  But the layers of Hathaway’s performance are many and varied, and the shading of the Pilot’s descent into psychosis while trailing a terrorist leader called “Number 2” is exquisitely rendered.  She is in full control—always active, never boring.  Ms. Hathaway is not perfect for this role, but she inhabits it so totally that she realizes a three-dimensional world behind her character.  There aren’t many performances, especially not in a show like this one, that can do that successfully.

Can Ms. Hathaway sustain a one-woman show?  Absolutely.  But it hardly seems a one-woman show at all thanks to Julie Taymor, the brilliant director of The Lion King, who here rejects the notion of “small-scale” to create a fully functioning, sleek, new-age marvel of a production in the Public’s 272-seat Anspacher Theater.  Ms. Taymor achieves things here that cannot even be explained in words, with the help of two standouts on her production team, scenic designer Riccardo Hernandez (who creates a miniature desert that serves too many symbolic purposes to name) and projection designer Peter Nigrini (who coalesces the world of the play in even a more tactile manner than Finn Ross on The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time).  Grounded has been staged before in New York (in a more pared-down production at Page 73 in January 2014), and it’s easy to see based on the projections alone how enormously Ms. Taymor and her team have improved this play.  During the drone-piloting scenes, the video of what the Pilot’s seeing—projected on the sandy floor and reflected by an enormous mirror behind the Pilot, which, like her, watches from above—makes us feel the gray dispassion of the pursuit in a way evocation could never have done.

Ms. Taymor has created a filmic production, using Ms. Hathaway as a geometric center around whom to stage gorgeous shots of which no other theater director active today would be capable, and from whom to absorb nervous energy which, like the Hellfire missiles the Pilot speaks of almost lovingly, will eventually explode.  But the collaboration between Mr. Grant and Ms. Taymor, besides resulting in a production of astounding literary and visual beauty, is politically and historically important such that it feels it could only be produced right here, right now.  It reaches into the life of a warrior of the future who repeatedly calls herself a god and draws out something both uniquely modern and deeply human.  This is what the Public, and indeed the theater, is all about.