George Brant’s one-actor drama, Grounded is on stage at The Belle Theatre in Cape Coral through April 7, 2024.
It’s the story of an ace F16 fighter pilot. After becoming pregnant, she’s reassigned to the “chair force,” where she operates drones 12 hours a day, seven days a week from a windowless trailer on an Air Force base in the desert outside Las Vegas.
Although she’s now insulated from the dangers of combat missions, she faces a much more insidious problem - keeping the emotional toll of hunting terrorists by day and killing them on command from infiltrating her family life.
But as boundaries between the desert where she lives and the desert where she fights begin to blur, she finds herself slipping into the grip of PTSD.
Belle Theatre Artistic Director Tyler Young chose Peyton McCarthy to play the role of the beleaguered fighter pilot, Jess.
“Peyton is somebody I’ve been working with since she was 8, and I’ve watched her grow and thought this is a great opportunity to put her on stage in a fabulous role and I knew she could handle it.”
McCarthy thought Young was pranking her when he approached her with the project.
“I’m not going to lie,” McCarthy professes. “I didn’t 100 percent believe him at first that we were going to go through with it all the way. I thought it was a great idea, but I was, like, ‘It’s a really cool opportunity. Let’s do this. Sure.’ And then when he turned around to me the next day and said, ‘Here’s the script. Here’s the materials.’ I was really scared at first, but really, really excited because it’s the craziest thing I’ve ever attempted and it sounds cliché, but I love a good challenge and I wanted to push myself. And this was the best way to do that.”
One-actor shows are rare. One-woman shows are nearly non-existent. Grounded finds itself in rarified air, joining Suzie Miller’s Prime Facie, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues among elite one-woman plays.
Like those shows, Grounded presents an enormous challenge for the performer. In it, McCarthy is tasked with using a mixture of skills, from narration and physical expression to character work and dialogue. It’s acting without a safety net.
There are no exits, no fellow actors to rely on, and only a single folding chair in the way of set and props. It’s just McCarthy, the audience, and pages and pages of script from which to make magic.
“It’s so weird being my own cue for my lines,” remarks McCarthy. “Having a conversation with someone on stage is one thing - you can bounce off, you can listen for those key words, there’s different physical cues that might happen. But with this, it’s all on me and I have to rely on my own memory and my own strengths to make it happen.”
Ironically, McCarthy’s family pushed her into acting when she was eight in order to help her overcome a bad case of stage fright.
Now, she doesn’t just star in a one-woman show. She turns in a groundbreaking performance that’s light years beyond any role she’s previously tackled. McCarthy’s performance will not just surprise patrons.
It will induce them to inch to the edge of their seats as a pervasive sense of foreboding envelopes them, forcing the oxygen from their lungs and removing it from the room.
But if that’s not enough to inspire you to catch the show, Belle Theatre Artistic Director Tyler Young includes this appeal.
“It’s different. It’s relevant. It’s current. It’s thought-provoking. It’s a drama that’s not done a lot. It’s new. It’s only been done in Southwest Florida one other time. So it’s something you haven’t seen before.”
As drones play an increasingly important role in warfare, Grounded lends some much-needed perspective about what it means to wage war from a point of complete disconnection.
To read more stories about the arts in Southwest Florida visit Tom Hall's website: SWFL Art in the News.
Spotlight on the Arts for WGCU is funded in part by Naomi Bloom, Jay & Toshiko Tompkins, and Julie & Phil Wade.
MORE INFORMATION
· Read, “Peyton McCarthy steps up game for one-woman show, ‘Grounded’” on Art Southwest Florida.
· Although Southwest Florida audiences know Peyton McCarthy primarily through her performances in comedies like Unnecessary Farce and Four Old Broads, she maintains that drama is her passion.
· “I love character work, and not that there’s not character work in comedies – you still have to do that there – but a show like this, I sat and researched everything I could about the Air Force and the military,” McCarthy relates. “I was taking notes throughout the script. I really had to dive deep into who this person is and who she is as a pilot, as a mother, as a wife, because it’s not something that came naturally to me. So being able to do that research and really get into it, made it incredible.”
· Grounded starkly shows that even a drone pilot can develop from PTSD. In fact, a drone pilot may be more subject to PTSD than an
F16 pilot as the latter may be miles down range when their bombs or missiles hit their intended target. By contrast, the drone operator watches the bombs strike and blow apart their targets, and psychiatrists and psychologists now know that anyone who witnesses a physical or sexual assault, abuse, an accident, disaster or other serious events can develop PTSD.
· In addition to Grounded, a number of one-actor plays have been produced locally, including Duncan MacMillan’s Every Brilliant Thing (Laboratory Theater of Florida), Nassim Soleimanpour’s White Rabbit, Red Rabbit (Laboratory Theater of Florida), John Logan’s I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat with Sue Mengers (Art Center Theatre on Marco Island and Laboratory Theater of Florida) and E.M. Lewis’ The Gun Show (Theatre Conspiracy at the Alliance for the Arts).
· George Brant’s muse for the pilot in Grounded was Major Stephanie Kelsen, known as Vapor to her peers. One of the few women flying military jets, she’d been in the Air Force 20 years when she became pregnant. Facing the possibility that she might not fly again, she asked photographer Shlomit Levy Bard to take her portrait. In the shot, the background is bleached out in a blinding white sky in an effort to engender “a feeling of the vastness that [Kelsen] experiences while flying”. Brant clung to that. His pilot struggles to sum up the sensation of flight. “You are the blue,” she stutters. “You are alone in the vastness and you are the blue.”
· Brant’s pilot is caught off guard by her pregnancy. “Something’s breached,” she says, stunned. She tries to hide her bump at work, ashamed of it. Brant wanted motherhood to jolt her. “It seemed important that she had experienced the exhilaration of flying before being forcibly assigned to the drone program."