Grounded

Or: The Blue and The Grey

In George Brant’s Grounded, The Pilot (Tess Musky-Goldwyn) meets us like a tiger in a cage. A former F-13 fighter she finds herself PWP (pregnant without permission) and reassigned, state side, to managing a new kind of war as a drone pilot. But fighting for her family and the American way in a different desert on the far side of the world, the pilots sense of what is real and what isn’t begins to blur, dangerously.

Suspended like an angry god high above a miniature desert and closed in by the blue, pink and gold of Sean Gunderson’s joint set and light design, Musky-Goldwyn swaggers. Laconic, cocky, savoring the bright, consonant-heavy ammunition of Air Force lingo, her martial, western spirit sparks lighting, received by her brusk but full hearted love for her family, a thing she doesn’t quite understand but cherishes as she can. A true poet and storyteller, she infects us with the thrill of the hunt, the rush and rise of chasing through the blue, or the strongly engaging absurdity of twelve hours in a chair looking at a grey screen, hunting “the guilty” as she calls them. But the Pilot’s story, nurtured so slowly by Brant and Musky-Goldwyn both to be undetectable, slides us out of the heartwarming into the dubious and into the downright chilling.

In her program note director Joan Sergay writes about the duel nature of G-d as taught in the Torah: Elohim, the unforgiving Commandment keeper, and Adonai the nurturer and guardian, who sometimes replaces the lightening bolt with sweet showers, to wash away ignorance and grow understanding. And so it is we see the Pilot, a self-proclaimed god, tip and totter from punisher to guardian and back again, hedged in and driven mad by a chaotic world not of her making.