Review: GROUNDED Lifts Off With A Top Gun Performance By Caitlin Newman

iTheatre Collaborative stands tall among a few companies (Stray Cat Theatre and the new A/C Theatre Company to name a couple) in the Valley of the Sun that dare to cross the threshold from convenient popular theatrical chestnuts to provocative and socially, if not politically and ethically, relevant mindbenders.

Its latest production, GROUNDED, directed by Rosemary Close, stays true to this modest company's vision and is a bold invitation to reflect on the morality of high-tech war.

Caitlin Newman delivers one hell of a powerhouse performance as the Pilot of George Brant's award-winning drama. From the moment she marches on to the stage, a broad-shouldered and steely presence, secure and righteous in her mission as an F-16 warrior, to her climactic epiphany, Newman controls the oxygen in the theater, and by the end of her nonstop flight of evolving conscience, we are left breathless.

All's well in Pilot's life. She is at home and in love with the wild blue yonder, soaring through the clouds with missiles to launch and kills to be scored. She is stridently one of the guys until one of the guys takes a loving to her, and their passion leads to pregnancy, and pregnancy leads to reassignment to what she calls the chair force ~ conducting Reaper drone strikes from a trailer in the Las Vegas desert on selected personalities in Afghanistan. At first despondent about the irony of a pilot with a parking space, driving to war like it's shift work, she gloms onto her new role. There is, however, a toll to be taken with this schizoid existence: drone strikes during the day; evenings with Eric and their beloved daughter Samantha. Now a mother, a mother's soul awakens with gripping consequences for Pilot.

A kill is a kill, whether at close range or from afar, and that's a reality and a burden with which Pilot must reckon.

Indeed, throughout the nearly eighty minutes of Caitlin Newman's super-charged tour de force performance, it is a reality and burden that every member of the audience must own and address.

GROUNDED runs through September 5th at the Kax Stage at the Herberger Theater Center ~ and, in these times of glib political chatter about drone warfare, should be on the short list of top shows to see.

Photo credit to iTheatre Collaborative

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