Grounded

Anne Hathaway returns to the stage

The Public Theater presents a new staging of George Brant's Grounded this April, starring Academy Award winner Anne Hathaway (Les Miserables). This riveting one woman show is an exploration of the morality of drone warfare, with Hathaway playing a drone pilot who begins to suffer physiologically from the monotonous, computer game style attacks she executes. It will be Hathaway's first appearance on the New York stage since she played Viola in a 2009 Shakespeare in the Park production of Twelfth Night.

With America's use of drones only increasing, Grounded seems even more relevant now than it did when Brant wrote it in 2012. It won a prestigious Fringe First award at the Edinburgh Festival in 2013, and had an acclaimed run at New York's TriBeCa Walkerspace a year later. The Public's intimate Anspacher Theater will host the play for this strictly limited six week engagement, with Tony Award winner Julie Taymor (The Lion King, A Midsummer Night's Dream) directing and providing innovative technical and media-driven effects.

What is Grounded About?

She used to soar through the skies in an F-16, but following an unplanned pregnancy an unnamed US fighter pilot is reassigned. She is tasked with controlling drone strikes from a windowless room in a Nevada Army base. The disconnect from the carnage she enacts begins to take a psychological toll, and she finds it increasingly difficult to balance her remote killing by day and her family life at night.