Review Roundup: Anne Hathaway in GROUNDED

The Public Theater just opened George Brant's Grounded, directed by two-time Tony Award winner Julie Taymor and featuring Academy Award winner Anne Hathaway.

In Grounded, an ace fighter pilot reassigned to a remote-controlled drone faces 12-hour shifts hunting targets from her Air Force trailer followed by 12 hours in the suburbs with her family in this award-winning new play about the complicated consequences of waging war without leaving home. Named one of the Best Plays of the year by both London's The Evening Standard and The Guardian, and winner of the Smith Prize for Political Theater.?

Let's see what the critics had to say...

Charles Isherwood, New York Times: And you get a chill hearing those words spoken by Ms. Hathaway in a voice both harsh and deadened, the eager enthusiasm in her character's eyes having been extinguished by all those days of staring into the gray anonymity of the deserts, where men, women and even children can die at the push of a button thousands of miles away.

Michael Dale, BroadwayWorld: Hathaway is excellent as the cocky protagonist, strutting with pride at her accomplishments and letting off steam with dive bar beers and satiating an aggressive sexual appetite. Motherhood and married life soften her only slightly but she convincingly transitions into someone feeling the effects of her godlike power to administer judgement and punishment growing fearful of the surveillance cameras that have become an accepted part of civilian life.

Elisabeth Vincentelli, New York Post: It's highly rewarding to watch Hathaway - wearing a flight suit, her hair in a tight bun - throw herself into the part of a no-nonsense Wyoming servicewoman whose cockiness crumbles when she discovers that the price of war includes actually seeing the death she brings, along with pervasive surveillance. "Watching does not protect you, for one day it will be your turn, your child's turn," an increasingly troubled Pilot says. It's a chilling moment - but it looks so good on that stage!

Marilyn Stasio, Variety: It's no good pretending that Anne Hathaway is just your typical journeyman actor working on a challenging one-person play. The Academy Award winner is very much the glamorous young movie star in George Brant's 2012 play, "Grounded," incongruously cast as a working-class kid from Wyoming who defines herself and finds her joy as an American Air Force fighter pilot. But with director Julie Taymor ("The Lion King," "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark") fielding the technology to get inside the pilot's head, Hathaway masterfully navigates her terrifying dive from high-flying heroics to the appalling reality of guiding drones to their soft human targets.

Jeff Labrecque, Entertainment Weekly: But while Hathaway gets a dramatic workout and the clever production values are impressive, George Brant's script is plagued by predictability-sapping the performance of its power. Even though drones are currently in the news-raising real-life questions about issues that Brant's play directly addresses-the conundrum of UAVs and their impact on soldiers on both sides of a conflict aren't as fresh or fertile in 2015, three years after the play initially debuted. Even for those who haven't delved deeply into the political and technological issues, the play's narrative dots are rather easy to connect. There are very few G-forces in Grounded, and even with a superstar at the controls, the audience experience never quite rises above cruising altitude. B-

Jeremy Gerard, Deadline: Working with little more than a chair and her pilot's uniform, Hathaway charges through this challenging monologue, written virtually as a free-verse poem that builds and builds in power - until writer, director and character merge in a single, indelible unity of vision I won't soon forget.

Joe Dziemianowicz, NY Daily News: Taymor has some tricks up her sleeves. A silent opening scene literally puts Hathaway's head in the sand. It's a bit heavy-handed, but the metaphor works for a play about seeing things as they are. Hathaway, a "Les Miserables" Oscar winner who thrives on stage, is riveting. From gung-ho exhilaration to excruciating despair to the brink of losing it, she is in command even she her character isn't. In "Grounded," Hathaway flies high.

David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter: Unlike her captivating work in the Public's Twelfth Night in 2009, Hathaway's movie-star wattage is an impediment to full immersion here. But her performance moves effectively through the play's intensifying stages, balancing control with raw feeling and white-knuckle fear. If the expected visceral gut punch doesn't quite arrive, that might be because Brant's ending seems melodramatic. And perhaps all the directorial pyrotechnics, while making this production unusually dynamic for a solo show, contribute to a certain detachment from the experience being portrayed.

Alexis Soloski, Guardian: Hathaway, too, is at pains to accentuate every syllable. She wouldn't be the first actor you'd think to cast in such a macho role, and she knows it. This is a consciously chameleonesque performance: movie glamour is exchanged for scraped-back hair and minimal makeup; mid-Atlantic vowels for Wyoming drawl. In the opening moments, Hathaway shows just how hard she's working to make this character persuasive. But eventually she relaxes into it. Or maybe we relax into her. The script demands a heightened performance, especially as the pilot grows increasingly unstrapped from observable reality, and Hathaway delivers. Monomania is one of her specialties, and she goes full throttle here.

Elysa Gardner, USA Today: While Brant clearly didn't intend The Pilot to represent the military as a whole, the utter lack of nuance in the character's world view is striking. It's rather too plain that the playwright is gearing up to make a point - and that this working mother is in for a troubling lesson. Still, this ardently humane play holds our attention as it grapples with a range of issues.The Pilot begins to imagine that she, too, is being watched; she starts to empathize with the people she has deemed enemies. Taymor, whose genius for stage spectacle was made famous by Broadway's The Lion King (and infamous by Spider Man: Turn Off the Dark), works beautifully with Riccardo Hernandez's minimalist set and Peter Nigrini's haunting projection design.

Linda Winer, Newsday: This is a taut, visceral psychological portrait of a rare woman fighter pilot, whose unquestioning love of the military mission, the danger and the open blue skies is derailed -- first by an unexpected pregnancy, then by a profound shift in the way we practice war. Hathaway, back onstage after her delightful 2009 Central Park debut in "Twelfth Night," gives a tightly-wound, unfussy, acutely disciplined portrayal of the woman identified in the program only as The Pilot. With a pinched tomboy twang and a cocky pride in her flight suit, she goes from "fantasy girl up in the sky" to what she initially mocks as the "Chair Force" at a video screen in an office in Las Vegas.

David Finkle, Huffington Post: American shame in regard to the undependable, unpredictable use of drones -- forget about them landing on White House lawns -- is intensifying. Thanks to Brant, Taymor and Hathaway, it'll only get worse. Thankfully. Maybe in response to growing dissent, policies will change.

Matt Windman, amNY: On rare occasions, a piece of theater can become even more relevant than its creators expected it to be due to recent events in the world -- to the point of being downright eerie. For example, just a few days after the president's announcement that two civilian hostages were accidentally killed in a drone strike targeting terrorists, George Brant's engrossing one-woman drama about a military drone pilot engaged in anti-terrorist operations -- starring Anne Hathaway and directed by Julie Taymor -- has opened at the Public Theater.

Jesse Green, Vulture: What I do find successful in Grounded, aside from the top-notch if eventually wearisome production, is its chilling portrait of future war as just another job scrubbed of its pernicious effects. (The pilot's husband works as a dealer at the Luxor Hotel & Casino, "cheating people" in another desert's pyramid.) Its larger implications, to which I'm not unsympathetic, need more thought. As it stands, Grounded seems to set up a false opposition; it asks us to be nostalgic for older forms of decimation. "It would be a different book, The Odyssey, if Odysseus came home every day," the pilot says. I'm not sure it would be a darker one.

Photo Credit: Joan Marcus

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