re: THE AMERICAN PILOT Reviews

[Wanna Be A Foster]

Posted: 11/22/06 at 4:27am

The New York Times is mixed-negative:

“The American Pilot,” a new play by David Greig that opened last night at City Center, turns on an incident that is unsettling in its gruesome familiarity. The title character has survived the crash of his plane in the hills of an unnamed country riven by civil war. Injured and unable to walk, he is saved by a farmer who shelters him in a barn. His fate — death or ransom — will be decided by the leader of a rebel faction who rules the territory and is fighting a regime supported by the United States. At one point a video camera is brought out to record the pilot’s planned execution.
_______________________________________________________
Extending the same strict measure of sympathy to most of his characters, Mr. Greig intends to reveal the dehumanizing influence of civil and global strife on all the little people caught up in it. But at just 90 minutes (there is also an intermission), the play is too schematic to do justice to the rangy moral territory it purports to explore.
_______________________________________________________
As his fate is being debated, the soldier, who speaks nary a word of the local language, suffers and fumes, and barks threats of retribution every time he is approached. Stolidly played by Aaron Staton, this character is not granted the depth of feeling that Mr. Greig is so careful to ascribe to most of the play’s characters, even the men contemplating his execution. (Only the pilot does not address a defining monologue directly to the audience.) Absurdly, he often seems more concerned about the peril his iPod faces than his own.
_______________________________________________________
Given the dispiriting situation in Iraq, clearly Mr. Greig’s inspiration, I’m not in a mood to argue that point. But “The American Pilot” reduces an intricate network of issues into a murky soup of verbiage spoken by characters who never lose the aspect of symbols. Straining for the universal and the topical too, Mr. Greig grasps only the generic.

And a generic play about an American soldier held captive and possibly primed for execution can hardly be expected to rivet our attention — or perhaps even escape our dismay — when real soldiers (and real civilians) are mired in predicaments of a similar kind on the other side of the globe, day after brutal, bruising day.

The New York Times Review - THE AMERICAN PILOT

Updated On: 11/22/06 at 04:27 AM

[Wanna Be A Foster]

Posted: 11/22/06 at 4:38am

Theatermania is mostly positive:

The global spike in anti-American sentiment as a result of the Iraqi war is beginning to edge into domestic literature and art like a spreading stain on Betsy Ross' flag. David Greig's new play, The American Pilot, which is getting its American premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club, may not be the first of its dark kind, but there's no denying that it lays out the unsettling condition in extremely clear terms. For that reason, it isn't an easy 90 minutes (including intermission) to endure in a theater seat, but it's got the "thanks, I needed that" factor.
_______________________________________________________
It's important to establish that Greig isn't interested merely in questioning the repercussions of underhanded American foreign policy. He understands that contemporary world politics is not -- if it ever was -- black-and-white, cut-and-dried. By concentrating on an isolated incident but intending it to represent a much larger situation, he's suggesting a broader look at American attitudes and the world's responses to them, especially three characters unsympathetic to the title figure: the trader, the rebel captain (Waleed F. Zuaiter), and a translator called Matthew (Geoffrey Arend), who was educated in the United States. The three other main characters are either sympathetic to Reinhardt or neutral: the farmer, his accommodating wife Sarah (Rita Wolf), and 16-year-old daughter Evie (Anjali Bhimani). Indeed, where the captain feels obligated to treat the pilot as a prisoner of war, Evie sees him as a savior and acts accordingly throughout.
_______________________________________________________
Desperate to save his skin, Reinhardt is arrogant yet noble. He cowers whenever a rifle or pistol is pointed at him, but he also threatens imminent retaliation from buddies who must be searching for him. He doesn't stop short of firing obscenities, either. Indeed, Greig has written Reinhardt as an American son of privilege with the pluses and minuses implied, and he's portrayed as such by Aaron Staton, who's as striking as the farmer claims. Under Lynne Meadow's urgent direction, the rest of the players are equally on target -- especially Zuaiter as a man trying to figure out the best tactics in an untenable position.

It's true that Greig wields The American Pilot as if he's a mugger with a blunt instrument. He probably could have produced a more refined illustration of his pessimistic, realistic take on current affairs. But this way, he gets your attention and leaves you holding your aching head.
Theatermania Review - THE AMERICAN PILOT

Updated On: 11/22/06 at 04:38 AM

[Wanna Be A Foster]

Posted: 11/22/06 at 4:49am

Talkin' Broadway is positive:

For two peoples supposedly speaking different languages, the words they're using all sound an awful lot like English. So why can't they understand each other? Why indeed, wonders David Greig in his fascinating new play The American Pilot, which is now premiering at the Manhattan Theatre Club. Maybe the problem isn't that we all speak in different tongues, but that we don't all listen with the same ears?
_______________________________________________________
All the characters speak with their compatriots in plain and unadorned contemporary English. And though only one major character is American, and looks it (the title character is a golden-haired, golden-skinned golden boy from the South), the others have been cast with an apparent disregard for the performers' ethnicities.
_______________________________________________________
Greig's most impressive trick is allowing you to hear and follow both sides of the story, but preventing you from sympathizing with either group by restricting interaction between them. Operating independently, neither provides you with enough information about its true intentions. And as he's purposefully unspecific about the locale (you can perhaps presume the Middle East, but it doesn't feel especially Iraq-like), even events you think you can easily interpret might give you pause: When the Captain produces a video camera, for example, what kind of statement does he really want to make?
_______________________________________________________
A lot of Greig's concerns never take form in the characterizations.
That doesn't, however, diminish the play's ultimate effectiveness, as it draws much of its drama from your own preconceptions about America's foreign policy, its role in world affairs, and how its recent actions have affected both. If Greig won't coddle those opinions outright, nor will he openly defy them: The world, he's saying, is what you make it. Much like communication itself.
_______________________________________________________
Greig sees everyone as in the same boat, which is rapidly taking on water. The only choice is to start bailing, and if the cause at times seems hopeless, it's never too late to start.

Talkin' Broadway Review - THE AMERICAN PILOT

Updated On: 11/22/06 at 04:49 AM

[Wanna Be A Foster]

Posted: 11/22/06 at 4:55am

Variety is mostly positive:

Why do they hate us? Brit scribe David Greig tackles that conundrum with a literate tongue and an open mind in "The American Pilot," which lands solidly at MTC after its premiere production by the Royal Shakespeare Company last season in Blighty.

Greig sets his riveting drama in a nameless country "mired in civil war and conflict for many years," imagining the impact on inhabitants of a rural village when an American pilot crash-lands in their remote mountain valley. Unable to communicate with their prisoner, the villagers project all their fears and fantasies about America onto the soldier, whose state of oblivion about the people whose land he has invaded proves as tragic as his own government's willful ignorance.
_______________________________________________________
Aaron Staton plays the blond, blue-eyed soldier boy for real -- silently wincing from the pain of a broken leg, containing his terror with a bit of bluster, clutching his MP3 player with its 4,000 precious songs by the likes of Schooly D and Snoop Dogg. But with that halo of light around his head, he could be some mythic hero or tormented saint as portrayed by an Italian Renaissance master.
_______________________________________________________
Once the captain of the local resistance movement (a forceful turn from Waleed F. Zuaiter) arrives on the scene brandishing a Kalashnikov, the political dynamic becomes more defined, if not clarified. The Americans, it turns out, have a history in this region through a previous involvement in the country's civil war. Their presence is still felt via the military government they financed and the ordinance they provided the army.
_______________________________________________________
The option of killing the pilot instead of trading him for political gain becomes more pressing whenever the captain's translator is on the scene. A frightening young man in Geoffrey Arend's quietly fierce perf, the translator is the most dangerous character in the play because he has been to America and come back with conflicted feelings of love and hate for all it represents to him.
_______________________________________________________
Only Evie, the farmer's teenaged daughter, feels no conflict at all when she looks at the pilot. At once unguarded and innocent in Anjali Bhimani's ardent perf, she alone sees in him the promise of hope and freedom that America wishes, and so often fails, to project to the world.

Greig overreaches here by turning Evie into a heavily symbolic Joan of Arc figure, burdening the character and straining the plot of his otherwise beautifully written play. But before he gets carried away, scribe delivers an intelligent and moving argument about the disastrous results when nations large and small look upon one another in such utter ignorance that they fail to see their common humanity.
Variety Review - THE AMERICAN PILOT

[muscle23ftl]

Posted: 11/22/06 at 5:24am

Did any BWW user see this play?

Updated On: 11/22/06 at 05:24 AM

[Wanna Be A Foster]

Posted: 11/22/06 at 5:33am

I did. I understand the viewpoints of all the reviews, but in terms of Isherwood's negativity, it sounds like he was just in a bad mood. It's a small play about a small, specific incident that gives people a glance into the miscommunications and misconceptions people have regarding current war-related events. I found the play to be very well-acted and strongly written. It's shocking, yes, but it is really sort of a wake-up call. It asks the audience to think, with an open mind, and consider the fact that we do not know everything and that our language and our culture is not the only functioning one. The play isn't about whose side one should be on (pro-war, anti-war); it's about humanity -- human relations, language barriers, and the consequences of ones lack of understanding of (and refusal to understand) others' day to day struggles and ways of life.

Updated On: 11/22/06 at 05:33 AM

[LadyDi]

Posted: 11/22/06 at 8:25am

I saw it too!
I agree with everything WannabeaFoster said!
I thought it was awesome! ( I wrote my review a couple of days ago)
Where would this world be right now if there were no communication gaps? Bottom line: humanity. We may live our lives in different ways, but we are all human beings. Every culture is misunderstood in one way or another. It's an ongoing battle. If this play can make one person stop and think and, perhaps, gain a bit of perspective and compassion, it was worth a whole lot more than the price of admission.

http://www.joshcasaubonfans.com

[munkustrap178]

Posted: 11/22/06 at 12:53pm

I saw it, and I respectfully disagree with the negative aspects of those reviews.

I thought it was positively wonderful. The most fulfilling thing I have seen in a long time.

Foster, you are right. IT seems as if Isherwood were just in a bad mood.