Have you ever turned the corner on an actor? After years of watching them, maybe on screen — or, in this instance, on stage?
You go from not registering just how good they are to becoming forever intrigued? (Scarlett Johansson’s “Match Point” performance did that for me.)
You begin to ponder why they work on you and others, why you’re drawn to their performances, why, when you see their name in a Playbill, you get a wee leap of faith that whatever the night brings, it’ll be more interesting for them being on stage?
This weekend, Anne Penner begins a run as the Pilot in the Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company’s production of George Brant’s taut drama “Grounded,” about an Air Force pilot who goes from soaring in F-16s to joy-sticking drone missions. The show runs through July 21 at the Dairy Arts Center.
I first saw, as in really saw, Penner in Local Theater Company’s fascinating, wry riff on the Scottish play “Undone: The Lady M Project,” in 2023. Penner — who cowrote the work with Mare Trevathan and Hadley Kamminga-Peck — played the lady in question with a bodily (and brainy) authority.
“The thing I find exciting about her work onstage and off is that she’s really courageous,” Trevathan said in an email. “She’s a braveheart. She asks for challenge, asks to do hard things.”
And so, on a recent Saturday morning, Penner walked into the black-box rehearsal space on the University of Denver campus. She wore black boots, green khakis, a dark blue T-shirt, her hair pulled back. Director Rick Barbour sat a couple of rows up. There was a single chair, lights.
This was not a dress rehearsal. Yet, that simple ensemble hinted at the no-BS temperament of the Pilot, the solo character in the conscience-rattling drama. Penner took a breath, walked out a door at the back of the stage. When she returned, she was transformed.
This character, she’s got swagger. She’s got a gaze that in that small space might make a theatergoer squirm. She’s an F-16 pilot. Take that, Maverick.
This being a rehearsal, Penner wasn’t wearing the Pilot’s flight suit, that highfalutin’ onesie. But you can see it. She makes you see it. You like it? The Pilot does. Turns out, so does the guy who braves a cordon of flyboys — her boys — at a Wyoming bar, she recounts with relish.
The Pilot’s a good storyteller. She’s on leave from flying missions above Afghanistan, above Iraq, when she meets her future husband, Eric. They have sex, she shares in language that’s a little bluer than that. “He tells me he can feel the sky in me.”
“I never wanted to take it off,” she says of her uniform at the beginning of a play that is about work and identity, eros and death, marriage and parenthood, too. It is also absolutely about the moral injury and psychological damage wrought on those carrying out bombing missions, especially ones piloted from a Barcalounger thousands of miles from the theater of war.
After all, it was the blue that called to the Pilot, that blue that she and the jet she refers to as Tiger pierced. In that blue, she was already miles away when the bombs she unloaded went “boom.” That word will return again and again, but its ramifications will change, as will the Pilot, once she is sent to Creech Air Force Base outside Las Vegas, to pilot drones.
The play’s meditations on a style of deadly warfare that isn’t even treated by the military as “combat” are searing and dismaying and remain timely. In this distilled and lethal engagement, the Pilot finds frustration, then a kind of fulfillment and then, well, a telling madness. How the mighty can be felled.
“Grounded” had a lauded off-Broadway production in 2015, directed by Julie Taymor with Anne Hathaway portraying the flyer. A discerner of smart drama, the Boulder Ensemble’s then-artistic director Stephen Weitz mounted the show in 2014 (featuring Laura Norman). Mark Ragan, the theater company’s current managing director, saw the very brief run of the Penner-led show in 2021 at DU.
“I’ll not bury the lede here: Penner’s 75-minute tour de force is spine-tingling, fierce and un-blinking,” he wrote in a review at the time. Then he added: “Penner has always struck me as a cerebral actress. On and off the stage, she seems forever immersed in thought. [This] highly literate play couldn’t have found a better interpreter. Though her performance is shot through with feeling, her Pilot is first and foremost an analyst, a color commentator of her own demise.”
That his company is now producing the show proves a persuasive example of putting money where mouth is.
Penner had been given the play by one of her acting students. “I remember reading it backstage at Colorado Shakes in the summer of 2017, and feeling the viscerality, feeling the kinesthetic energy of it in just reading the words. Loving how it’s built as short lines,” she recalled over coffee. “It just felt so vivid on the page. And I thought, ‘I want to do this.’ And then I didn’t. It was hard to find the time.” She’s a mother of two, a professor, you get it. And then the pandemic hit.
“Anne was going stir crazy, you know, with the COVID limitations — not being able to work and stuff. And I certainly wasn’t a happy camper about it, but she really wanted to work on something,” said Barbour, Penner’s colleague in DU’s Theatre Department.
Acting — thought-provoking-tear-jerking-riling-so-many-of-the-feels-and-convictions acting — becomes a different sort of marvel when you put your mind to it. As a teacher of acting, Penner has thought on it, a lot. She and Kateri McRae, a professor of psychology at DU, even launched a podcast about it in 2018: The Actor’s Mind. If you want, as Penner puts it, to “nerd out” about acting, this is an awfully fun and satisfying place to start. The duo’s insights often offer beguiling paths to other mind-body-spirit-performance considerations.
So, what about taking on the role of the Pilot? “I think I was drawn to her because she both felt like me and very different from me,” Penner replied. “There are things that I immediately could align with her: the struggle to find balance between work and family, the kind of split screen-ness of that. I love how assertive she is. I can be quite assertive, though not as much as her. I think I liked how confident and self-possessed she was.” Even in the devastating final scenes, the Pilot carries a kind of authority, one she turns on us, the theatergoer, the citizen.
But make no mistake — and this is the subtle power of Brant’s drama — the Pilot is also a killer. While she may not have thought much about that when she was flying missions in the Middle East and Central Asia, it engenders a steep and psychologically complicated plummet when distilled by a screen 18 inches from your visage, a joystick in hand and targets whispered in your ear.
Penner credits Barbour with getting at one of the play’s more uncomfortable insights: the building frisson she experiences in killing. “Yeah, Rick got me there. When she says, ‘The screen isn’t that big, but it becomes your world. Like the TV, I guess, or the computer.’ That’s it. And it’s just like, she’s so turned on. It’s both like sex and, like, a drug.”
At the start of Saturday’s rehearsal, Barbour and Penner joked it might be “a stumble through.” Hardly. Some 70-plus minutes and with the final line reverberating, our photographer looked a little shell-shocked.
Penner returned to the room, moved the chair that the Pilot had been seated in but also orbiting with coiled intensity. “70 minutes long, still,” she said, looking at Barbour.
“And 10 miles deeper,” he said and then gave her the kind of notes you share when all the work is crafting nuance.
Asked later how the show had changed after four years and two other productions, Barbour replied, “It feels like we’re operating at a level that it’s truly like being fully lived and fully channeled, fully attuned.”
“If we were in the NCAA Final Four last time, I feel like we’re in the NBA now. Does that even make sense?”
It does.
IF YOU GO
“Grounded”: Written by George Brant. Directed by Rick Barbour. Featuring Anne Penner. At the Dairy Arts Center, 2590 Walnut St., Boulder, through July 21, For tickets and info: betc.org or thedairy.org.
