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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Commuter warrior

May 1, 2015 by Terry Teachout

The Broadway season ended last week, and today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, in which I review the off-Broadway premiere of Grounded, reflects that fact. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

No director makes more magical stage pictures than Julie Taymor. If only she were better at using them to illustrate what her actors are saying! Her fantastically complicated 2013 production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” for example, was a mountain of buttery frosting beneath which the sweet cake of Shakespeare’s verse all but vanished. Ms. Taymor’s staging of George Brant’s “Grounded,” by contrast, is both more modest and more effective, an eerily timely monologue about drone warfare that no amount of misguided directorial excess—and there’s plenty of it here—can sabotage.

Grounded Public Theater/Anspacher TheaterAnne Hathaway plays a fighter pilot who becomes pregnant and is reassigned from Iraq to a Las Vegas base, where she joins the “Chair Force” as a drone operator. She carries out “personality strikes” on “military-age males” halfway round the world, then drives home to her doting husband and baby daughter each night after work….

“Grounded” is a taut piece of storytelling that shines a bright light on the little-understood emotional stresses that gnaw at the psyches of the practitioners of electronic warfare who only see the people they kill on a TV screen. And while Ms. Hathaway is now a movie star, she still knows her way around a stage: Her performance is tough and smart…

But “Grounded,” as usual with Ms. Taymor, is smothered in a thick sauce of over-elaborate, over-literal visual and sound effects. It’s as though “American Sniper” had been staged in the hyperactive video-game style of “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.” While the parade of stage trickery is always ingenious and often memorable, it deprives the audience of the chance to use its collective imagination to bring the play to life….

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Anne Hathaway and Julie Taymor talk about Grounded:

Almanac: George Abbott on first plays

May 1, 2015 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“Very few plays are any good and no first plays are any good.”

George Abbott (quoted in Maurice Zolotow, “Broadway’s Most Successful Penny Pincher,” Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 29, 1955)

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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