This April, Anne Hathaway will team up with prize-winning director Julie Taymor for the play Grounded in New York. Hathaway, who won a best supporting actress Oscar for Les Miserables, will play an elite fighter pilot reassigned after becoming pregnant to operate drones from a trailer in the Nevada desert.
The 70-minute monologue, by George Brant, explores the pilot’s emotions as she does 12-hour shifts aiming at targets thousands of miles away, then returns to her husband and infant daughter at night.
The Public Theater will stage the New York production. Artistic director Oskar Eustis said: “Grounded is a brilliant and important play, a meditation on the human and moral costs of our astonishing military technology. This promises to be an unforgettable theatrical event, and an important addition to our national conversation.”
Written in 2012, the play won the 2012 Smith prize for works about American politics. A production at Edinburgh the following year was named one of the 10 best plays of the year by the Guardian. Thanks to the NNPN’s Rolling World Premiere programme, the play was staged 10 times in 10 months around the world.
Hathaway, a board member of the Public Theater, was last seen on stage as Viola in a 2009 production of Twelfth Night by New York’s Shakespeare in the Park. Julie Taymor won a Tony for directing The Lion King, while her production of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, made headlines around the world – though not always for reasons its team may have enjoyed.
Eustis said: “Anne Hathaway and Julie Taymor are amazing, unique artists, and we are honored to produce them at the Public Theater.”
