InterAct Theatre Company presents George Brant's 'Grounded'

Kittson O'Neill is resplendent as the unnamed Pilot, whose reveries about her job are intoxicating. She loves her olive flight suit, never wants to take it off. "You are the blue," she exclaims about flying her multi-million dollar F-16, an exhilarating vision. We seldom see women warriors depicted, particularly in the fighter pilot's boys's club, and even rarer are characters expressing such unbridled pride and passion for combat.

War as shift work

Her happy life, which includes "taking the guy spot" in bars with male peers, ends abruptly when she finds love with a civilian, becomes pregnant, and has to make a decision. "I want the sky, but I can't kill her," she confesses. She's transferred to a drone program, derisively called "the chair force," and exiled to a trailer in a Nevada desert parking lot, where she uses a joystick to fly "unmanned aerial vehicles" on the other side of the world.

Husband Eric finds a Las Vegas casino job, and Pilot drives to work every day. Brant's script and O'Neill's performance make this new assignment harrowing, a vivid contrast with her mundane home life. She watches a high-definition black and white screen, "the guilty" moving obliviously below. People become abstractions, "like someone carved a world out of putty."

The play's title has two meanings. Once Pilot is grounded, she becomes a less grounded individual. She’s obsessed with tracking the enemy and triggering an addictive rush when, with a finger's flick, she dispatches them with missiles. Yet, despite driving home every night, she’s simultaneously disconnected from her family. "It's like shift work, punching a clock," she explains. It's still war, however, even though "the threat of death has been removed."

If combat is risk and danger, she reasons, it's not combat — but the silent gray "booms" on her screens, the orgasmic release like a video game times a million, threatens to devour her.

Compelling abstraction

Kathryn MacMillan, who directed the similarly issue-rich, socially conscious, and feminist Mrs. Warren's Profession, onstage at Lantern Theatre Company through October 16, expands the spiritual and abstract aspects of Brant's taut 80-minute script. Nick Embree's set is a partial geodesic dome, with translucent triangular panels backlit by Masha Tsimring and some panels missing. Bunched fabric on the floor suggests the rugged terrains of both Nevada and Afghanistan. O'Neill uses just a metal chair. Lighting through the industrial floor highlights the high-tech artificiality of Pilot's desk-bound post. It's a coldly metallic place that doesn't easily accommodate Pilot's emotional states.

Rob Kaplowitz's sound is intriguing and beautiful, but sometimes maddening. Is that a deliberate, though almost undetectable, throbbing meant to accentuate Pilot's mental state — or the ventilation system kicking in? Music wafts in, then evaporates. Distant gunfire echoes eerily. I love that it's simultaneously subtle and daring.

The whole production provides an ambitious approach for an unusual play, in which O'Neill often narrates events while living them with great skill. "It would be a very different book, The Odyssey," says Pilot, "if Odysseus came home every day." Indeed, it might be as harrowing as Grounded.

To read Mark Cofta's review of Lantern Theatre's Mrs. Warren's Profession, click here.