Rep tackles struggles of war
Pius grad directs ‘Grounded’
What director Laura Braza cherishes most in theater is what the character at the heart of “Grounded” is denied:
The opportunity for direct engagement.
“I am absolutely most interested, theatrically, in people in a space breathing together and being there with the characters,” Braza said before starting a rehearsal of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater production, which begins Wednesday.
The unnamed American fighter pilot in “Grounded” would rather be breathing in the same space as the Iraqi bad guys she’s trying to kill, but an unplanned pregnancy has grounded her. She is reassigned to the “chair force” in Las Vegas, piloting drones via joystick to bomb targets in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“Having all the coping mechanisms for combat, how does that translate into asking a soldier to go from war to home every single day?” Braza said.
“I’ve been joking with my friends,” she said, “that my sense of humor has become very dark as of late because I’ve spent so much time reading war memoirs and researching PTSD and watching drone footage.”
But Braza does not joke about the powerful insight she gleaned from reading Chris Hedges’ book “What Every Person Should Know About War.” In wars fought from ancient times up through the invention of airplanes, combatants had some form of long march home that gave them time to process with their comrades what they had been through.
“One of her primary struggles in this play is there is no time to process,” Braza said. In a blink, the pilot (portrayed by Jessie Fisher) goes from a 12-hour shift of drone bombing to her home life as mother of a young child. “She’s being asked to operate in two vastly different modes all the time.”
“How do you go to a restaurant and sit with your back to the door if you’re in war mode?” Braza asked rhetorically.
Directing at the Rep represents a happy march home for Braza, a 2004 Pius XI High School graduate whose parents live in Mequon. As a youth, Braza said, she went to “almost every Rep play.”
While she had always loved theater, her primary energy went into swimming until injury derailed that pursuit. In Braza’s junior year at Homestead High School, working with English teacher Angelina Cicero stoked her passion for theater. “I’m sure this was not her intention, but she really set me on this path of (pursuing) this as a career actively . . . ”
After attending a strong summer program
there, she transferred to Pius for her senior year; she names teachers Kevin Schwartz and JoAnne Gellman-Woodard as two of the mentors who guided her.
The Rep must be enjoying this homecoming, too. It’s enlisted Braza to return in the fall to direct “Souvenir.”
Braza is artistic director of New York’s Attic Theater Company, which specializes in staging “relevant but underproduced American works,” including “the dreamer examines his pillow” by John Patrick Shanley. Braza said her company is guided by the question “what is the work that we can do that couldn’t be done on film.”
On one hand, “Grounded” fits that philosophy. “One person telling her story to a group of people,” Braza said. “She talks directly to the audience. She recounts her story, she jokes with them.”
Yet this play about a combatant struggling to adjust to the new technology of war is also making its director wrestle with technology in the theater. The production uses image projection and video screens in its depiction of drone warfare.
“We are so addicted to screens, so the moment a screen is put in front of us, it grabs all of our at- tention, we shift into that passive mode … ,” Braza said. “Anything that encourages people sitting in a room together to tune out or go into their heads fights what makes theater she said.
She plans to challenge that automatic slide into passive viewing mode by putting audience members in the middle of a battle be-
“How do you go to a restaurant and sit with your back to the door if you’re in war mode?”
tween the screens and a scintillating human performer on stage.
The Rep has scheduled a series of talkbacks and special events for “Grounded.” Of special note: Veterans performance group Feast of Crispian will do a short pop-up show in the Stiemke lobby following the Rep’s 7:30 p.m. March 14 performance of “Grounded.”