The upcoming BETC production represents years of work by Penner and director Rick Barbour
Actor Anne Penner is set to reprise her role as an Air Force UAV (drone) pilot in George Brant’s play Grounded. The solo show being produced by Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company (BETC) is directed by Rick Barbour and plays July 11-21 at the Boulder Dairy Arts Center.
Penner, a theatre professor at the University of Denver for the past 13 years, is a familiar site in Colorado productions from the Colorado Shakespeare Festival to BETC to her OSCA-winning portrayal of Lady Macbeth last year in the Local Theatre Company production of Undone: The Lady M Project.
I caught up with Anne on a video call to ask her what attracted her to this show, the challenges of being on stage alone, what the story could mean to Americans and more. Here’s our conversation, edited for lengthy and clarity:
OnStage Colorado: So, all right, Anne, let’s talk about Grounded. Have you done any solo shows before?
Anne Penner: Yes, I did this one back in 2021. I’ve known about the play since 2017. And when the pandemic hit, I had time and I was going to go crazy if I didn’t work on something. So my colleague, Rick Barbour, who directed it, we started in June of 2020 and we didn’t present it to an audience until May of 21. And then again in November of 21. So we really just slowly worked on it in that capacity. I believe it is the only one-person show I’ve ever done.
OSC: Okay. And so what was your experience of just doing that, being the only one on stage, and no one to save you if you forget a line or anything like that?
AP: Because you do not have a scene partner to focus on and guide you and kind of bring you back on track when your mind wanders, you need a bunch of other targets and things that you can focus on as if they are scene partners. So Grounded is a really cool combination of direct-speak to the audience, mixed pretty organically with her retelling and reliving these moments of dialogue with other people and experiences that she’s had in the recent past. So it’s really fun to toggle back and forth between actually looking at audience members and then looking at these invisible scene partners like her husband or her commander or her daughter, people like that, or this screen that she looks at when she becomes a drone pilot. So that’s one tool to stay focused.
And then the second thing that happens is that it’s really easy to get automatic with the words. When you have a scene partner, they kind of move you on to the next moment, right? But with solo you have to be the one to move yourself on to the next moment. So this idea of staying present in the thinking over 70 minutes is really challenging. It’s a really, really exciting thing to tackle because it is happening constantly. So that’s the thing that I’m working on now. And my colleague and director Rick is really good at being like, “Let’s work on that beat. I think that beat is actually a little more like this and not just the same as what you just said.”
OSC: What drew you to this play?
AP: A former student gave it to me and said, “You need to read this. It’s just a great piece.” And you know, when you read a piece and it kind of grabs you in a way that you can’t stop reading it, right? It impacts you in a way where maybe when you’re reading a play, you can actually begin to hear how the words might be spoken or how it might be staged. That happened with this because the writing is so distinctive. She speaks in phrases, not full sentences. It’s almost like a piece of Shakespeare, like Shakespeare’s written in verse, right? And you get hit at the end of the verse line. The same is true of this piece where it’s like you hit the end of a line and then it’s like, well, what happens next?
So that, her assertiveness, her confidence, and the language itself really struck me.
OSC: As an American, what’s your take on this story?
AP: She is a patriot at the beginning. And she believes that what she does, which is flying F-16 fighter jets for the Air Force in the Iraq war, is righteous, is black and white, and she is killing the bad guys, the guilty. And she is really good at her job, and she 150 percent believes that it is the right thing to do.
From an American perspective … I was in my 20s when 9 -11 happened and I grew up not always supportive of the federal government, but just kind of assuming so naively and ignorantly that the rest of the world kind of loved America or looked up to America.
And then 9-11 happened and my whole universe shifted, and I was like, people hate us. People want to annihilate us. And so I think that is the journey that she goes on, that she starts as like pro-U.S. military, pro-patriot, I love the U.S., what I do is great. Doesn’t matter that involves killing people because they’re bad, they’re guilty. And then her universe shifts. So by the end of the play, she feels completely different about that.
OSC: It’s a really interesting exploration of this weird phenomenon of the war fighter as an office worker and the gigantic disconnect between, what you’re doing with these weapons and how far you are from, from the action. And the other thing that’s fascinating about this script is that it’s not often that a war story focuses on something from a female perspective. So I wanted to ask how much does this character’s lived experience reflect how a woman would look at this versus maybe if it was a male character?
AP: She’s definitely cisgender. Like she through and through sees herself as a woman, as a girl. She’s heterosexual. And yet the way that she lives her life is more stereotypically male than female. So, I think there’s a lot of flexibility about what her background is. Sometimes people play her with like a Southern accent, which I’m not doing, because I think she could come from anywhere. I think she’s American, but she could come from anywhere in the U.S.
But she’s like one of the guys, really, until she meets her future husband. And even then she’s just kind of like having a one-night stand. But there’s about the fact that she gets pregnant and she wants to keep this child that begins to kind of shift her view of where she wants to dedicate her time. So, in that way, that maybe could be perceived as more stereotypically female. She’s a woman through and through, but she’s not a feminine woman. But what’s exciting is she a hundred percent identifies as badass fighter pilot. And then when she realizes she’s going to have a kid, that kind of messes with her sense of devotion to the military.
OSC: You mentioned color as an integral element in Grounded.
AP: Yes, color plays a huge part in the play. She talks about flying and being in her blue as a fighter pilot. And blue for her is like sublime, godlike, certainty. Like again, righteousness, rightfulness. And then she spends much of the play in gray, like literally gray, cause she’s looking at a gray screen as she flies the drone. But gray equals liminal, I don’t really know what I’m doing. I don’t know who’s the enemy. Who’s the good guy? What’s right? What’s wrong? What am I doing? My god, this feels good. But actually, what I just did was wrong.
And then by the end of the play, she symbolically kind of finds her blue again. And so that’s a really fun thing to map — how the playwright offers you these colors and how they mean different things.
OSC: Let’s talk about your partnership with Rick and the role of the director in a show like this.
AP: There’s actually a lot of staging that Rick has figured out and it’s repeated throughout. He helped me make sense of why she’s saying what she’s saying. Because it’s so easy for an actor of any experience level to get bogged down in kind of the memorization, regardless of why they’re saying something or what they even mean.
And so, especially with a one-person show, you can kind of just speak the words without actively thinking them through. Rick was really good at things like, “She says this here because, and this is what this means.”
I’m really proud of our staging. It just has a bunch of cool floor patterns. There’s a lot of her walking in a grid to either go to work or go home. Her relationship to the chair shifts. It can be her car. It can be home. It can be sitting in the chair when she’s flying the drone. You know, downstage left corner means home. Downstage right means this part of the desert that she happens upon in the second part of the play. The chair in the whole second half of the play is her flying the drone.
OSC: So these things are not going away. In fact, they’re getting even more scary with their capabilities in the air and also on the ground and at sea. What’s your thought on bringing this reality to audiences with Grounded?
AP: It’s extremely satisfying to decide you’re the good guy and that other person behaving differently is bad, right? They’re the enemy; they’re guilty. And so I think the value of this is that you see an American woman feeling like she knows right from wrong through and through. That’s how she lives her life. And then she encounters personal experiences and professional experiences that force her to adjust and realize that maybe the world isn’t so black and white. And maybe those people who I had zero empathy for, who I was literally willing to annihilate for my country are just like me.
And so she discovers empathy, and that to me is the overarching story, even separate from the fact that it’s about a military person.
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