Stage

Mindy Woodhead masterfully loses her grip in Cockroach’s ‘Grounded’

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Chair force: An unnamed woman struggles to balance drone piloting and home life.
Ryan Reason
Jacob Coakley

Four stars

Grounded December 3, 5, 10-12, 8 p.m.; December 6 & 13, 2 p.m.; $16-$20. Art Square Theatre, cockroachtheatre.com.

In this day and age, Las Vegas is known for a few things: casinos, craziness and Creech. The drone capital of the world lives just a few miles north, and as America’s never-ending war on terror continues, so do the drone attacks.

Cockroach Theatre’s Grounded, a one-woman show written by George Brant and playing at Art Square, examines the psychological toll of constant surveillance and at-a-distance warfare through the story of an unnamed “Woman.” A former fighter pilot, now member of the “U.S. Chair Force,” she struggles in her new role as a drone pilot and attempts to create some separation between her combat life and her home life—now too uncomfortably close.

Mindy Woodhead plays “Woman” with all the swagger and emotional limiters commonly found in fighter pilots. She searches for her identity now that she’s no longer a pilot in the big blue, the only place she truly feels alive. Woodhead doesn’t track you through this emotional journey exactly—because her character doesn’t have the ability to cope with it exactly—but all of it is riveting. The intense physicality of her performance speaks a vocabulary separate but complementary to her monologue, and she delivers a nervy, uncanny performance of a person unmoored, increasingly lost to themselves and others, yet searching for a way back with the same intensity with which she took to the skies. She slowly drowns in inexplicable emotion, not knowing how to find her way out—and clinging desperately to the lodestones she finds.

The production itself is a fairly straightforward morality play, shot through with splashes of imagistic poetry, and Cockroach’s version finds that poetry on the technical side of things as well. Old-fashioned scenic elements are utilized, along with high-tech video and looping audio, plus an evocative, saturated lighting design. Though it becomes a little too busy, I don’t begrudge any lighting designer for not wanting to be penned in by the gray world that takes over the main character. This is as an accomplished production on all levels, guided in well by director Andrew Paul. In the end, as Woodhead lets her hair down and goes full gorgon, she affixes us all with a judgmental stare—and the fevered, accusing look on her face is enough to turn you to stone.

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