Monday, August 24, 2015

reviews - GROUNDED - iTheatre Collaborative

Caitlin Newman
photo: iTheatre Collaborative
highlights from local critics reviews - (click link at bottom of each review to read complete review)

Click here for more information on this production that runs through September 5th.

Grounded, the riveting one-actor play by George Brant, is about a female fighter pilot who prides herself on being one of the boys. Bursting with brashness and bravado, she drops f-bombs with enthusiasm almost equal to the exhilaration she feels when she delivers actual bombs to America’s enemies....a devastating emotional roller coaster that actress Caitlin Newman takes the audience on in the season-opening production from iTheatre Collaborative. Prowling like an angry tigress within a claustrophobic gray square, Newman’s intensity and physicality electrify the intimate Kax Theatre, the black-box space at the Herberger Theater Center in Phoenix. On a bare-bones set consisting of a chair and some video projections, this actor, with direction from iTheatre co-founder Rosemary Close, creates an entire world for her character....both thematically provocative — grappling with difficult realities without being reducible to a simple political message — and dramatically satisfying."  - Kerry Lengel, Arizona Republic (click here to read the complete review)

"iTheatre Collaborative...dare(s) to cross the threshold from convenient popular theatrical chestnuts to provocative and socially, if not politically and ethically, relevant mindbenders. Its latest production, Grounded, directed by Rosemary Close, stays true to this modest company's vision and is a bold invitation to reflect on the morality of high-tech war. Caitlin Newman delivers one hell of a powerhouse performance as the Pilot of George Brant's award-winning drama...Newman controls the oxygen in the theater, and by the end of her nonstop flight of evolving conscience, we are left breathless. All's well in Pilot's life. She is at home and in love with the wild blue yonder, soaring through the clouds with missiles to launch and kills to be scored. She is stridently one of the guys until one of the guys takes a loving to her, and their passion leads to pregnancy, and pregnancy leads to reassignment to what she calls the chair force ~ conducting Reaper drone strikes from a trailer in the Las Vegas desert on selected personalities in Afghanistan. ...Now a mother, a mother's soul awakens with gripping consequences for Pilot....Indeed, throughout the nearly eighty minutes of Caitlin Newman's super-charged tour de force performance, it is a reality and burden that every member of the audience must own and address."  -Herbert Paine, Broadway World (click here to read the complete review)

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