In Grounded, a one-woman play by George Brant, a pregnant pilot is reassigned from active combat to handling a drone. Safe in a trailer in the desert, she’s half a world from her targets, but she can see them better, through the drone camera. Her life is shattered, not only because she misses cruising freely through blue skies: Just how do you handle everyday life at home after spending your work day killing people?
Brant’s language is so vivid, his descriptions so detailed, that readers may feel design is almost unnecessary. Turns out, designers say the play, which has been given over 35 productions and counting, is, as sound designer Lindsay Jones puts it, “a designer’s dream. It’s so vivid in so many ways and yet leaves so many possibilities for ideas.”
Should a play about surveillance and military technology be tech-heavy? Or should a character-centered story be less so? The five productions here all used projections, none to create literal locations, but they related to technology in different ways. Check out Part One, which covers The Public Theatre.
City Theatre
At City Theatre Company in Pittsburgh, Jenn Thompson staged Grounded in a tiny black box that scenic designer Anne Mundell calls “a little cave of a theatre.” Mundell took down all the masking in the house and rebuilt part of the theatre, using scenery that mimicked walls and painting these a light grey. She substituted neutral seats for the red seats in the house. “I wanted audiences to walk into a wildly unexpected place,” she says.
“We wanted to hint at the arc from absolute freedom to absolute confinement,” says Mundell, who hung a ceiling over a simple 8x8 platform in the middle of the room. Sky could be seen over the top of performer Kelly McAndrew’s head. Lights could make the room shrink when she became confined. The pilot never left a raised square grid, two feet off the deck.
At first, the team considered flooding the room with projections. In the end, they treated the play as a long poem, placing the pilot in a room with nothing, not even a prop. “She is telling us a story from a nebulous emotional space. We really wanted to put her in all of those places in her mind,” says Mundell.
Projection designer Lawrence Shea says the challenge was to convey both being grounded and trapped, but also the elation of flying. While lights reached the stage through the box above, Shea was able to angle projectors from the side and projection map the video to the surfaces of the boxes above and below. The mapping combined with lighting could eliminate video on her body, or allow it when desired.
Shea researched drones but didn’t use real footage of strikes. “I wanted to reference the horror of what was happening and trigger memories of what people have seen without showing it,” he says. He created texture by adding text that a pilot would have on a heads-up display. His favorite cue? When she talks about a nightmare, floating up and up, he projected a satellite image of Phoenix across her body. “The image got smaller and smaller and smaller. It was a moment where the design took a little of the foreground; it helped support the feeling and got really creepy,” he says.
A Caged Animal
The team tried matching the pilot’s words to visuals—“If she talked about turning left, the video would turn left.” After a day of teching, they found it impossible to cue. “Even when we got it working, it didn’t bring much to the drama,” says Shea, who substituted six-second delays for a more suggestive connection between her words and the video.
“The challenge was to be sure everyone was seeing the same thing from all four sides,” says lighting designer Martin Vreeland. As the pilot moved between spaces, Vreeland played with tonality, pushing the feeling from warm to less warm and less healthy as the play progressed. He lit outside the box just once, focusing on the surrounding theatre walls when she experienced blue skies in flight. A wash of magenta represented home, and a greenish color the trailer in the desert. Later, when she remembers flying, he reintroduced the blue, but this time confined in the set with her.
When she lies down in the desert, and a video fills the floor, covering her, Vreeland lit enough of her to pull her features out. He had to light the pilot without lighting the audience and says he tried to “wipe pathways around the stage [so she could] walk from corner to corner like a caged animal.” A grid on the ceiling piece itself became a visual element; Vreeland left lights on while he manipulated levels and played with different colors. Using Philips Strand Lighting and Coolortran Ellipsoidals, Altman Fresnels and Par64s, and a cool white fluorescent mounted in the ceiling piece, Vreeland used mostly front light, angled in, and some downlight. Mostly, he relied on color blasts to change the tone, introducing harsh downlight in the trailer and templates only at the end of the play. Lights, sound, and video played off each other. “When the jet takes off, the sound got louder and louder, the video exploded, and I zoomed in on Kelly,” says Vreeland.
Sound designer Toby Algya says his soundscape evolved seamlessly with the narrative, a slow burn that speeds up at the climax, ending in a crescendo as a bomb hits a father and child. But sometimes he broke into this, punctuating sounds for quick transitions —“the character would turn and be in a new scene or new headspace,” he says. Underscoring and soundscaping conveyed the pilot’s mood and gave a sense of environment without creating literal sounds. “It wasn’t the sound of drones but of how she was feeling it. There was a bit of a digital quality to it, washed out—you couldn’t quite hear the rumbling.” The pilot’s husband makes a CD mix for her that she listens to on a drive through the desert, something Algya conveyed in a 15 second montage of ten songs, all washed and blended together.
Sabrina Zain designed the pilot’s costume. Stay tuned for coverage of four other productions, including Unicorn Theatre, The Gate, and American Blues Theatre.
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