Celeste Oliva starred in The Nora Theatre Company's production of "Grounded."
A play from George Brant, called "Grounded," has struck a nerve with audiences from Australia to Israel.
The drama revolves around a female F-16 fighter pilot who finds herself pregnant. She's reassigned to duty as a military drone operator, but she has difficulty rediscovering her old fighter pilot swagger from an air-conditioned trailer in Las Vegas. Then it slowly dawns on her that although she's an "eye in the sky," she's also being watched.
The show will open at New York's Public Theater next month with Anne Hathaway in the lead role, right around the same time as the premier of the movie "Good Kill," which stars Ethan Hawke as another anguished drone pilot.
Brant, the playwright, says artists and audiences are keen to explore the moral ambiguities involved in the use of military drones and non-stop surveillance, not just in societal terms but in the minds of the pilots themselves.
"These pilots are seeing things on their camera that are much more intimate than you would ever see in a fighter plane," Brant says. "Sometimes they will surveil people for days or weeks and just watch them hang laundry, and watch them talk to their children and develop an intimacy with these people that you would never have flying over at 500 miles an hour."