Actress Kit Foreman has a favorite line in “Grounded,” the mesmerizing one-woman play in which she stars at Cascades Theatre in Bend.

“I have a couple of favorite parts,” Foreman told GO! “But I think my favorite line in the show is when I say, ‘It would be a very different book, “The Odyssey,” if Odysseus came home every single day.”

That’s the very different life her character, a drone pilot, lives with every single day in this play by George Brant: Technological advances enable drone pilots to work remotely, from comfy chairs in buildings on the other side of the world, situated at a staggering remove from war.

During a rehearsal last week, Foreman stalked the stage as the strong-willed, and just plain strong, ace F-16 pilot, whose name is never revealed. (A Guardian review of Anne Hathaway’s 2015 turn in the role described the character as “macho.”) Ninety minutes has never flown by so fast.

After surviving several Iraq deployments — maybe even thriving, given the extent to which her identity is wrapped up in — our hero takes leave back home in the States, where she meets a man at a bar who finds her line of work as intoxicating as she does, something not all men do in her experience. In short order, she’s pregnant, married and a stay-at-home mom — for a time. She misses wide blue skies too much to stay earthbound.

But when she reports back to work, she finds a changed workplace. The weapons of war have changed: F-16s are being used in drone practice. Here the “Grounded” the title suggests comes to light. The pluses of skippering a drone: She can work at an Air Force base an hour from home (Las Vegas), controlling a 36-foot by 66-foot Reaper drone on a 1.2-second delay a world away in Afghanistan. She’ll see her family every day and sleep in her own bed at night. But remember what she said about “The Odyssey”?

The minuses: Her shifts are 12 hours long, seven days a week, spent staring at a gray screen piloting drones. Gone is the vast and colorful sky. Work is almost like one long video game except it’s not. As she notes, video games are in color. The dreamy blue skies are dismissed by a world gone gray. At night, she tries to hold down a normal life. As the pressures mount and her perceptions blur, the heroine becomes distressed, imperiling her career and her life.

Foreman learned of the play through a friend. “I said, ‘Oh my God, this is amazing,’” and promptly brought it to the attention of her mother, Lilli Ann Linford-Foreman, hoping her mother would direct her in the show.

But Linford-Foreman had to read the play a couple of times to fully envision the possibilities.

“It’s written like a free-form poem,” she said. “It’s written almost in verse. So it’s challenging to read and visualize … but I really liked it, and I thought it would be a great opportunity for us to work together.”

The mother and daughter have starred in shows together, including as mother and daughter a few years ago in a CTC production of “The Glass Menagerie.”

Linford-Foreman, who recently starred as Mattie Fae in the ensemble comedy “August: Osage County,” used to recruit her daughter whenever she needed a child character for shows by Magic Circle Theatre, the erstwhile company Linford-Foreman led years ago at Central Oregon Community College. But this is the first chance she’s had to direct Foreman since her daughter reached adulthood.

For her part, Foreman said the biggest challenge she’s faced in the role has been “accessing vulnerability as the pilot.”

“As a human, I just don’t particularly enjoy being vulnerable,” she said. “I think most of us don’t.”

Her mother concurs. Like the pilot Foreman plays, “She’s a very strong person. She’s working as a paramedic,” Linford-Foreman said. “She worked as an intern for a medical examiner for a year. She’s a tough cookie, my girl. But she has a very soft, tender heart, and so in life she has learned to protect that and sublimate that.

“But on stage playing this character, she has to be able to access it, because that’s the same challenge the character is having,” Linford-Foreman continued. “She’s a very strong woman, but she is struggling with the situation she’s found herself in.”

Mom has struggled a little herself seeing her daughter act as someone in distress.

“It’s hard,” Linford-Foreman said. “I can do it by an act of will, but the first time she really committed to it and did it, Juliah (Rae, assistant director) and I both were in puddles at the end. It’s hard to watch.”

But watch it you should, she believes.

“I’m hoping it makes people think about the stress, the strain that serving in that type of position puts on people and their families,” the director said. “And, of course, the larger question of we’re fighting a virtual war that is virtual for the people there in trailers but very real for the people on the ground in Afghanistan. And the idea that the Air Force didn’t really think about how difficult it was going to be on those pilots and the various support staff there. It’s just not a well-known fact about our involvement in the Middle East.”

Thursday night is preview night, for which the usual $10 door price will be waived for military veterans. After Sunday’s matinee performance, a behavioral health specialist from Deschutes County Veteran Services will join the director and star for an onstage conversation with the audience.

“Because of all the topics we’re raising, there may be people who want to talk about it afterwards,” Linford-Foreman said, adding, “I’m always afraid people are going to go, ‘Oh God, it’s about the military, how depressing.’

“And I don’t think it’s a depressing play. I think it’s a play about being human. It takes us through the full range of emotions,” she said. “I don’t think you can see this play and walk complacently out of the theater. I think it will affect how people think and feel. And that’s what the best theater does.”