Often found at theaters and museums, Kwon Mee-yoo has covered a wide range of cultural fields from K-pop and dramas to theater and fine art for over a decade. Now as K-Culture Desk editor, she tries to connect Korean culture with global readers through fresh perspectives.
Play 'Grounded' examines surveillance state
Cha Ji-yeon performs as the pilot in a scene from the play "Grounded" at Wooran Art Scape 2 in Seoul. / Courtesy of Wooran Foundation and Project Group Ilda
By Kwon Mee-yoo
By Kwon Mee-yoo
The play “Grounded,” staged at Wooran Art Scape 2 in Seoul through Sunday, throws a few well-timed questions on gender, warfare and technology.
The one-hander by American playwright George Brant revolves around a fighter pilot whose life takes an unexpected turn as she gets “grounded” from flying for being pregnant and delivering a baby. After years of maternity leave tending her family, she reports her return to her commander, expecting to fly, but instead gets assigned as a member of the "Chair Force" who operates remote-controlled drones over the opposite side of the world.
Instead of actually flying over the sky of faraway lands, the pilot works a 12-hour shift at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. Her new day begins at a home near Las Vegas, where her husband works as a blackjack dealer, and the pilot drives across the desert, in the safety of remoteness, to control her drone that is flying over the deserts of the Middle East.
“The eye in the sky, that's me. That's me now. I fly a plane and stare at a screen that stares at the ground," the pilot says.
However, the play is more about modern surveillance society where a person's every move is monitored by cameras everywhere. Though getting married and becoming pregnant provides the reason for the pilot take a leave from flying temporarily, unmanned drones are an irreversible trend in warfare as technology advances.
Despite her grievance over the transfer, the pilot starts to become a menace as she bombs enemies on the other side of the earth at the click of a finger and becomes a destructive god of war during the day, feeling omniscient and omnipotent.
The pilot experiences confusion as she divides up her day into looking down and punishing "criminals" at work, and playing with her daughter Sam and watching TV with her husband at home.
As the boundary between her real life and the grey screen blurs, she becomes concerned about surveillance cameras even during a play date with her daughter at a shopping mall. Her paranoia hits a peak at a long-awaited moment of the target her team has been following for days; a crony of the enemy bosses, finally emerging from his car.
There is no better person in Korea to tackle the fighter flier-turned-drone pilot role than Cha Ji-yeon, one of the top stage actresses in Korea who took a hiatus due to childbirth and thyroid cancer.
Cha vividly envisions the colors symbolizing the pilot's state of mind from blue and pink to endless grey as she stares at the monitor 12 hours a day. She deftly and devastatingly portrays how the unapologetic pilot slowly falls victim to the drone warfare, portraying the character's strengths and weaknesses via her versatile acting skills.
The inverted quadrangular pyramid-shape set creates an air of anxiety as the vanishing point is at the center of the stage. The immersive sound system provides realistic sound taking the audience from the sky and drone operation trailer to the inner world of the pilot.
The Wooran Foundation, which fosters young artists and has staged such notable works as "Bernarda Alba" and "The Heart (Reparer les vivants),” cooperated with the Project Group Ilda to present the Korean premiere of "Grounded."