In the “chair force” world depicted in George Brandt’s Grounded we witness the slow grinding boredom of the new way to wage war, punctuated by moments when a pilot feels a God-like rush to take action against the bad guys. The warrior is, at first, a strutting “gung-ho lifer” who initially has no compunctions about wasting a bad guy’s life until more personal issues find their way into the warrior’s mind.

But then the warrior is no longer piloting a high-flying, fancy, F-16, doing unseen damage from high in the blue sky. This warrior is piloting a high technology drone which endlessly surveils and then can destroy someone in the time it takes a signal to transmit half way around the world into the air above Afghanistan…in this case, a bit over one second. Then a silent poof as a missile is launched, destruction happens seen from grey images on a screen.

To some this particular warrior may be an unlikely one. She is an unnamed, grounded pilot. She was grounded after she unexpectedly became pregnant and then became a mother and wife. No longer flying high into the wild blue yonder, she is a drone pilot in a barcolounger an hour’s drive from Las Vegas in the Nevada desert. A desert not unlike what is in Afghanistan.

Grounded is a fairly taut portrayal of this unnamed Air Force Major’s life as she unravels into a break-down into a lock-up awaiting a court-martial. Grounded is not so much a drama about the morality of new warfare methods, nor is it a flashy production full of visual pyrotechnics. In its own way, it is very old-fashioned; a one actor monologue with the pilot (Lucy Ellinson) trying to get inside the audience’s head and stir things up.

Grounded is to be appreciated for Ellinson’s acting prowess over its 60 intermission-free, claustrophobic minutes. The audience comes to know Ellinson’s character as her mind opens up even as she is “locked” away in the transparent box that is her mind. It is her mind-box we peer into as her crack-up slowly begins, taking away her pride, her sense of self and much more.

Now before I go too much further into this review, let me say this, I was once in the Air Force, as an intelligence officer in a war long ago. I was stationed in the Far East and worked in a large windowless box, with some of my unit in a trailer not unlike what is depicted in Grounded miles farther from my own main windowless box. It was a different war, Vietnam, and I was not a “gung-ho lifer.” I recall utter monotony, until events happened which set all into a highly stressed mode. I was often enough the only officer on duty in the world of around the clock shift work. Decisions had to be made. Actions had to be taken. So, Grounded is a show that brought my own memories flooding back.

Under Christopher Haydon’s straight forward direction of Grounded, we first come in contact with the Pilot as she is in a transparent box, by way of set designer Oliver Townsend. She is actively surveilling the audience. AC-DC like rock music (sound designer Tom Gibbons) is blaring. The Pilot is not passive as she stands in her at-ease position even moving into a more swagger laden pose with hands in front, always watching. And the words begin to flow. The grinding down of her pride, her personhood, and the unnerving juxtaposition of killing from a distance only to drive home and be with her husband and daughter.

We see her descent into her own private Hell as her words tumble out, her fists harden, her pilot’s cock-sure strut is no more. Lights flash in the mind box as things happen. In the last gripping five minutes or so of the production, the audience witnesses intimately the Pilot’s actions and inactions. Frozen. Traumatic. Then a black-out leaving the audience to contemplate the issues raised.

As directed by Haydon, who is the artistic director of Britain’s Gate Theatre and directed the show there, Grounded is a well-accomplished production with a rhythm of life working in the stressful conditions that war brings. Some of the technical and acting elements hit quite well. The blaring music to drown out boredom and help to alleviate stress. The pilot’s need for a blatant kind of lusty life to prove herself alive.

This is playwright Brandt’s introductory course into modern, distant warfare. It will not be the last such teaching production from a playwright or screen writer, I am certain. Grounded is not a drama about the larger morality issues of new warfare including the use of drones. It is more an intimate portrait of one particular woman warrior. A warrior who believes totally in “protect and destroy” as an adage. Who thinks being a pilot is being a “rock star.” Who at first wears a flight suit (Oliver Townsend again) as a powerful sexy attire that draws men to her.

In an interview, Grounded playwright Brant is noted to say: “I approached this play with a lot of questions and wasn’t sure where I stood with this new technology and the moral implications of it; I’m happy anytime American soldiers lives are not at risk, but am troubled by some of the moral implications of [drone warfare] and what it’s doing to our standing in the world.”

Grounded is an issue-raising script and performance that doesn’t shrivel away from tough matters. It has its share of tragedies depicting a world rarely shown on stage. It is another import from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival but will strike a different nerve than the vastly different Black Watch that Shakespeare Theatre brought to town a few years ago. Of possible interest for those who see Grounded is a new movie that will be opening soon in DC, that started as a play written by Matt Witten. It had a one performance screening last week at the E Street Cinema. It is called “Drones.”

Studio Theatre’s artistic director David Muse has brought to DC, what is surely to be a growing list of theater productions not unlike what some of us vividly recall from the Vietnam War era. Different wars with new artistic visions and distinct voices.

Note: I recall this from 1970 as my unit (called Able Flight back then) would sometimes sing from Elton Johns’ “Burn Down the Mission” with lyrics by Bernie Taupin:

If we’re gonna stay alive
Watch the black smoke fly to heaven
See the red flame light the sky.
Burn down the mission
Burn it down to stay alive
It’s our only chance of living
Take all you need to live inside.

Photo Gallery

Photos provided by Studio Theatre

Cast

• The Pilot: Lucy Ellinson

• Playwright: George Brant
• Director: Christopher Haydon
• Set and Costume Designer: Oliver Townsend
• Lighting Designer: Mark Howland
• Sound Designer: Tom Gibbons
• Technical Tour Manager: Katy Munroe Farlie
• Studio Technical Director: Robert Shearin

Disclaimer: Studio Theatre provided a complimentary media ticket to ShowBizRadio for this review.

Moving beyond its flame-thrower of a title, Mike Bartlett’s Cock is a striking, verbally pungent jolt of theater about a love-triangle for contemporary times and audiences. The production is part of Studio’s New British Invasion Festival.

In Cock we witness two men and a woman circling each other; trying to get the right angle and upper hand for a take-down of sorts. To the victor, goes the prize of a lovely young man, who keeps everyone hanging on, but one who has his share of commitment-phobias, to use a dated term of reference. The characters smash at one another with the spewed-forth, hurtful words of people who know well each other’s vulnerable places.

The play is a competitive schoolyard wrestling match, with verbal taunts, and accompanying thrusts and parries as the audience views the goings-on almost as school chums of one or another of the active participants. Will someone get hurt or just give-up and leave the circle forfeiting the match and the prize?

In the case of Cock it is a very angst-filled bout of constant movement with words spit out in an overlapping manner. Then a beat or two of silence to assess the damage. Under David Muse’s direction the production takes on an athletic air with attacks and counter-attacks, rather than cock-fighting event with blood, physical dismemberment and death the expectation. Muse gives the show a plenitude of game-playing offensive and defensive movements and maneuvers; grapples, holds and attempts at take-downs. Whatever sex and sexuality that might be expected with the play’s title is accomplished with words, rather than a shedding of clothes or hot public shows of affection.

Written by the Brit Mike Bartlett, who is in his early 30’s and has made a mark in only about seven years of playwriting. When first produced in Great Britain, Cock won an Olivier Award in 2010 for Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre. In the Studio program, Bartlett is quoted; “theatre has to appeal to people who do jobs and have lives…the only choice is where your focus is. Do you write your play thinking about other plays? Or do you look out the window and say, my play is about that –whatever the world is. That’s what I’m after.”

Permit your reviewer a digression, but when I read those words from Bartlett, I was drawn back to Al Kooper’s bluesy version of Donovan’s “Season of the Witch” with its lyrics of “When I look out my window, Many sights to see, And when I look in my window, So many different people to be, That it’s strange, So strange…must be the season of the witch.”

Cock forcefully tells the story of two men in a long-time relationship just as the younger one, named John (convincingly played in a passive-aggressive manner by Ben Cole in his Studio début), artfully pushes for a break. He is either bored or unhappy with the way his older, stock-broker partner, named M (Scott Parkinson ably showing both a powerful “bitchy” bitterness and a nuanced vulnerability based upon real hurt) treats him. And off John goes.

Soon enough John finds himself involved with not another man; but a divorced, childless woman in her late 20’s named W (a lovely sometimes gentle, sometimes forceful Liesel Allen Yeager in her Studio début as a risk-taking woman going after what she wants). W is a school teacher of sorts. But, for confused and convoluted reasons, John returns to M seeking a reconciliation. M at first seems willing to forgive John, but then is not so certain. He needs some proof of John’s permanence in the partnership. So a dinner is planned to settle the matter. And we learn that W does not want to give up on John who has become the man of her dreams with the possibility of a future to include marriage and children.

There is also a late-comer to the proceedings, M’s father who is called F. As played by Bruce Dow, he is a middle-aged widower with life experiences of his own. He is a wild card at the dinner giving weight to his son’s love for John. He wants the woman W to just go.

This is the set-up for Cock, a tale of sexual attractions and a plenitude of simultaneous conflicting feelings along with an abundance of heated exchanges that pose complex questions about identity, sexuality, and a need for certainty and loyalty in a relationship. As the perplexed John asks himself, “what do I wish to be” his response to himself and others often enough is, “you can’t force me.” He is just in a dumb-struck muddle. He is at a loss of what comes after physical desire and sexual attraction with another human being of any gender.

The technical design for the intimacy of the Milton Theatre is what director Muse described in his program notes as “unencumbered by furniture or scene shifts.” There are short pauses accompanied by a tone-perfect sports buzzer to begin each new interval of action, courtesy of James Bigbee Garver. With Debra Booth’s spare set; a circle of hard-packed (but so clean-looking!) grayish sand-dirt mixture in which the combatants do their work is lit by 10 long fluorescent tubes from lighting designer Colin K. Bills. The only other hard set design element is a circular, blondish plywood back drop It is sometimes used as sitting place for the characters to take a momentary break and a public sip of water, as an athlete might do during a period, quarter or half-time interlude from action.

Alex Jaeger’s tasteful costumes give off the aura of each character. Parkinson wears nicely fitted clothes including a vest and fine laced brown shoes, Yeager is attired in a stylish, well-fitted figure-hugging black dress over her small frame that gives off a chic femininity along with square 3+ inch heels. Cole is in more casual attire with Tiger-like athletic shoes and an open neck shirt.

In program notes, Studio Theatre Dramaturg Adrien-Alice Hansel called the show “an unflinching examination of the vertiginous and seemingly provisional nature of identity itself” with the “main character paralyzed by ambivalence, in love with two people, his long-term boyfriend and a woman he’s just met.” Phew, now that is an excited mouthful of a description, but not off the mark.

So we have character John, who is questioning his sexuality and frames of reference. Who does he love, what does he want? How will he decide between the two people who want him? Would John’s charm and prowess be sufficient for a long-run partnership with anyone? Bartlett’s Cock asks many questions, but leaves answers up to audience members to contemplate and perhaps decide.

Cock is an accomplished trek into a well-groomed performance and culturally loaded play that is worth an audience’s attention. As the play unfolds, it digs deeper and deeper, leaving no character unscathed. Your reviewer leaned ever forward throughout so as not to miss the striking, vivid dialogue and nuanced movements.

And now I am going downstairs to play my very worn vinyl copy of Al Kooper’s “Season of the Witch” and then to YouTube for Donovan’s original version.

(Note: This production contains strong language and sexual content.)

Photo Gallery

Liesel Allen Yeager (W) and Ben Cole (John)	Ben Cole (John), Scott Parkinson (M), and Liesel Allen Yeager (W)
Ben Cole (John) and Scott Parkinson (M)	Liesel Allen Yeager (W), Ben Cole (John), and Scott Parkinson (M)

Photos by Teddy Wolff

Cast

• John: Ben Cole
• M: Scott Parkinson
• W: Liesel Allen Yeager
• F: Bruce Dow

Artistic and Design Team

• Playwright: Mike Bartlett
• Director: David Muse
• Set Design: Debra Booth
• Lighting Design: Colin K. Bills
• Costume Design: Alex Jaeger
• Sound Design: James Bigbee Garver
• Dramaturg: Adrien-Alice Hansel
• Dialect Coach: Ashley Smith
• Casting Director: Jack Doulin
• Production Stage Manager: John Keith Hall
• Technical Director: Robert Shearin

Disclaimer: Studio Theatre provided a complimentary media ticket to ShowBizRadio for this review.

This is chamber music. There are moments when all six cast members in Studio Theatre’s production of the first two of Richard Nelson’s four-part Apple Family series — That Hopey Changey Thing and Sweet and Sad — play in a unified ensemble. Then one voice predominates, with harmonious or discordant incursions by others. Then another voice picks up a similar or quite different melodic thread. There are crescendos and diminuendos; there are sometimes gradual and sometime abrupt changes in tone and tempo. This is very American chamber music, more Ives than Mozart, and, while posing unanswered questions, each piece has its own completeness.

Nelson’s plays focus on the intersection of the personal and the political, on how public events are reflected or paralleled in the interactions and emotions of an extended family. Each play is set on a day of national significance: election day 2010 in the case of That Hopey Changey Thing and the tenth anniversary of 9/11 for Sweet and Sad. (The third part of the series, Sorry, occurs on election day 2012 while the fourth, Regular Singing, which opened last Friday at New York’s Public Theater, is set on the 50th anniversary of the John Kennedy assassination.) On each occasion, the members of the Apple family gather for dinner in the family home in Dutchess County, north of New York City.

They are a diverse and contentious lot. Barbara (Sarah Marshall), the eldest of three sisters, a high school teacher, is the glue who holds the family together, making room for others and trying to keep the peace. Her brother Richard (Rick Foucheux), a career lawyer with the New York State Attorney General’s office, is taking a better-paying job with a corporate law firm, apparently under pressure from his offstage, and universally disliked wife, Pamela. For this, Marian (Elizabeth Pierotti) attacks him as an apostate from the family’s Democratic Party orthodoxy. Relentlessly energetic Jane (Kimberly Schraf), a Manhattan-based writer struggling to finish an ambitious book project, brings her younger boyfriend Tim (Jeremy Webb), a mostly unemployed actor.

Long the head of the family, Benjamin (Ted van Griethuysen) has suffered brain damage as the result of a heart attack, leading to what the characters call “amnesia,” a nearly complete loss of both long-term and short-term memory. Benjamin remains articulate, his acting instincts sharp, but he remembers almost nothing from one moment to the next. Alone among the characters, he is immune from — beyond, perhaps — the personal and political contentions of the day. Van Griethuysen gives a subtle performance, full of small gestures and nuances in facial expression, providing loveliest grace note in a production full of fine acting.

The plays brim with topical political and social discussion and debate (if That Hopey Changey Thing is still being performed 15 or 20 years from now, programs may need a lengthy list of footnotes), as characters hold forth on economic inequality, the politics of personal destruction, the nature of acting, youth suicide, the meaning of a culture’s manners and customs, the cynicism and perfidy of politicians, and a variety of other subjects. If there is any criticism to be made of Nelson’s excellent scripts, it is that the characters engage in more extemporaneous speechifying than one is likely to encounter at the average family dinner.

These are not plot-centered plays, but the characters do change over time. Marian, for instance, a strident, sometimes unpleasantly shrill, political partisan in the first play, is a deeply wounded woman in the second, having suffered terrible personal losses in the interim. Richard, defensive in the first play about his career change, in the second becomes more willing to talk about the pernicious effects of the gap between the rich and everyone else. One of the keynotes of Foucheux’s portrayal is the anger that underlays both Richard’s personal and professional lives, anger that does not diminish the intensity of his caring for his sisters. At political swords’ points with Marian in the first play, he becomes fiercely, and sometimes tenderly, protective of her in the second. Benjamin is increasingly dependent on others as the two plays progress. Tim gingerly navigates his way through the extended family’s emotional minefield in the first play — it is the first time he has met any of the Apples other than Jane — then becomes more comfortable joining in the fray in the second, while the strains in his relationship with Jane become clearer.

As well as being funnier, That Hopey Changey Thing is more explicitly about politics than Sweet and Sad. As befits a play on the anniversary of 9/11, the tone of Sweet and Sad is quieter, at times elegiac, as when Marian listens to a choral requiem or Benjamin recites a Whitman poem based on the poet’s service in Civil War hospitals. The country’s ongoing recovery from the trauma of 9/11 is reflected in the tentative beginning of Marian’s ability to cope with the sadness in her life in Sweet and Sad, just as the divisiveness of politics in recent years is reflected in the sometimes bitter disputes among the Apples in That Hopey Changey Thing.

It is deeply refreshing to witness plays in which characters, words, and the thoughts they inspire are at the center of things. No showy technical wizardry here: the set consists of a dining table, a card table, some chairs, and, behind the back wall, a realistic older kitchen. There are a few sound effects (e.g., dog barks in the first play), but they too are part of the plays’ realism. The lights change briefly between beats of each play, with somewhat warmer colors in the second play than the first. As a framing device, each play begins with characters setting the table and ends with the characters removing the dishes and tablecloth, leaving the set as it was before the play began.

Never forget that the Apples are a family. The history they share, the sometimes painful intimacy they cannot help feeling, the sentences they finish for one another, are part of an unbreakable bond, a small ongoing community that nurtures them. This is the source of the emotional power of the plays as well as the source of their overarching unanswered question: can the country, the larger society, find ties that bind and sustain in a time of division and violence?

Cast

• Richard: Rick Foucheux
• Benjamin: Ted van Griethuysen
• Barbara: Sarah Marshall
• Marian: Elizabeth Pierotti
• Jane: Kimberly Schraf
• Tim: Jeremy Webb

Production Staff

• Director: Serge Seiden
• Set Designer: Debra Booth
• Lighting Designer: Daniel MacLean Wagner
• Costume Designer: Helen Huang
• Composer and Sound Designer: Erik Trester
• Dramaturg: Adrien-Alice Hansel
• Production Stage Manager: John Keith Hall
• Technical Director: Rob Shearin

Disclaimer: Studio Theatre provided two complimentary media tickets to ShowBizRadio for this review.

The title of Donald Margulies’ play, currently running at Studio Theater, reflects a conflict zone photographer’s perception that, when she is looking through the viewfinder at a well-framed shot, all the chaos and destruction around her are banished for a moment. The title becomes ironic for the photographer, Sarah (Holly Twyford), and her partner James (Greg McFadden), as, over time, the assumptions on which they base their relationship change in ways that take them in directions they don’t expect.

Margulies’ characters spend some time debating the ethical dilemmas that photojournalists may face (e.g., snap that picture of the injured child vs. help the child), but these discussions are the least effective, and probably least important, portions of the script. What matters is how Sarah and James deal with wrenching changes in their lives, first from Sarah’s serious injuries while covering the war in Iraq, then from considering the implications of a lifelong commitment, then from the dawning realization that they are following different paths in life.

The play’s second couple–Richard (Don Illian) and Mandy (Laura Harris)–present a simpler, sunnier contrast to the complex and sometimes hard-edged characters of Sarah and James. Richard, Sarah’s and James’ 50ish editor, has fallen happily in love with the 20-something Mandy, to Sarah’s somewhat cynical amusement (“There’s young, and then there’s embryonic”). Harris gracefully takes her character on a convincing journey from good-natured, clueless airhead to radiant young mother, a spokesperson for seeking joy even in a world having much of darkness. Illian complements her as a man reveling in unexpected happiness after a long history of contentious relationships and career striving. His best moment as an actor involves Richard’s worst moment as a character, as he attempts to rationalize spiking a story in which James was deeply invested.

Responding to Sarah’s near-fatal injuries and his own questioning of the adrenaline-fueled, danger-filled lives on which he and Sarah had based their relationship, and with the example of Richard and Mandy’s relationship before him, James comes to value an ordinary, happy life–comfortable apartment, wife, maybe kids some day. McFadden articulates his character’s thoughts effectively, though at times the stakes do not seem as high for him as they should be. For example, when after dealing with some equanimity with Sarah’s admission of having slept with her interpreter in Iraq, James is incensed by the thought that she loved the man as well. McFadden displays James’ anger, to be sure, but he is not shaken to the core as a key premise about Sarah and his relationship with her is called into question.

Sarah is the meaty kind of role that any actor would love to play: she is smart, independent, sarcastically funny, determined, angry, emotionally raw, passionate about her work, capable of tenderness, ultimately incapable of change. Twyford’s performance nails the many dimensions of her character, making Sarah’s ultimate decision about the direction of her life clearly understandable. Her approach to her life is as fixed as the images in her viewfinder, but she has the grace to realize it and accept the consequences.

In a four-character play, ensemble playing among the actors is a must, and this group plays as well together as any good string quartet. Timing of lines and silences and the actors’ non-verbal reactions are impeccable, and the pace of the action is well maintained without being hurried. The subject matter of the play is serious, but there are some well-played humorous moments, and the production’s tone is not allowed to become gloomy.

The detailed New York apartment set is in keeping with the psychological realism of the play, though it seems odd that the residence of a professional photographer has not a single photograph on the walls. Sound, lights, and the other technical aspects of the production are on a level one would expect from a well-established professional company like Studio.

Photo Gallery

Holly Twyford, Greg McFadden, and Dan Illian	Holly Twyford
Holly Twyford and Greg McFadden	Greg McFadden, Dan Illian, and Laura C. Harris
Holly Twyford	Holly Twyford and Greg McFadden

Photos by Scott Suchman

Cast

• Sarah: Holly Twyford
• James: Greg McFadden
• Richard: Dan Illian
• Mandy: Laura C. Harris

Production Staff

• Director: Susan Fenichell
• Assistant Director: Jamila Reddy
• Floor Manager: Alicia Sells
• Deputy Floor Manager: Phoebe Duncan
• Associate Technical Director/Master Carpenter Mike Donohue
• Carpenter: Nick Jennison
• Carpentry Apprentice: Nick Tosches
• Scenic Artist: Luciana Stecconi
• Properties Director: Deborah Thomas
• Assistant Lighting Designer: Rob Denton
• Master Electrician/Sound Technician: Adrian Rooney
• Electrics Apprentice/Light Board Operator: Allison Burris
• Electrics Crew: Colin Dieck, Zac Dalton, Frank Miller, Angela Pirko
• Sound Board Operator: Aaron Fisher
• Costume Shop Manager: Brandee Mathies
• Make Up Effects: Skip Smith
• Make Up Technician: Mary Lockwood
• Hair Stylist: Patrick McKee
• Assistant Production Manager: Jennifer Harris
• Company Management Apprentice: Danielle Mohlman

Disclaimer: Studio Theatre provided two complimentary media tickets to ShowBizRadio for this review.