The play centers on a 75-minute monologue by The Pilot, a nail-hard fighter pilot who, after an unexpected pregnancy, finds herself “grounded” by motherhood. Years later, she reenlists, but much to her dismay, rather than tearing through “the blue” in an F-16, she finds herself executing “Reaper” missions out of a trailer in Las Vegas. She’s flying drones — or as she calls it, joining the “Chair Force.”
A small furor erupted online earlier this year when details emerged about the operatic version of “Grounded,” which will open the Metropolitan Opera’s 2024-25 season. The listing of military contractor General Dynamics as a “presenting sponsor” on the WNO’s website drew early fire from critics, who lambasted the opera as military propaganda at best and war porn at worst — the latter due to the production’s teasing of high-tech visuals.
The WNO responded by adding a disclaimer to its ticket page: “For the sake of clarity, no sponsor or supporter of WNO had any involvement in the creation of ‘Grounded’ or in the contents of its libretto.”
It’s the kind of warning that braces you for a big impact. And while there’s plenty to be praised about two-time Tony-winner Tesori and Brant’s adaptation — the individual performances, the accommodating lyricism and surprising delicacy and daring of Tesori’s music, the inventive staging and orchestration — it’s an opera that seems (perhaps appropriately) distracted from its primary mission.
What’s changed about “Grounded” in its transition from play to opera? For one, The Pilot now has a name: Jess, brusquely and convincingly sung throughout with terse swagger, savage wit and compressed sensitivity by mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo. For another, she’s not flying solo: The impressive tenor Joseph Dennis is almost too powerful a voice for Jess’s naively needy rancher husband Eric; bass Morris Robinson embodied a commanding Commander; soprano Teresa Perrotta delivers a beguiling, pitch-bending turn as Also Jess — i.e. Jess’s dissociated self (an opera trend almost as hot as LED screens).
There’s also now a Trainer (Frederick Ballentine), a “Hackers”-inspired co-worker named the Sensor (Kyle Miller), Jess’s young daughter Sam (the talented Willa Cook), an entire “Kill Chain” of voices heard singing orders through the scruffy signal of Jess’s headset, and a full male chorus of ghostly soldiers, their sturdy undergirding a musical highlight.
It’s unclear what, beyond strong voices, these extra bodies bring to the tale. Despite a powerfully forlorn aria in his casino uniform, Eric has all the depth of a deck of cards, and his chemistry with Jess is entirely entrusted to the music to convey. The presence of Sam, albeit sweet, seems more in service of softening us to Jess than softening Jess to anything. Everyone feels optional. In so many ways, “Grounded” remains a one-woman show.
Also new is director Michael Mayer’s staging, which disposes with the play’s minimalism in favor of Mimi Lien’s split-screen set: A raked upper deck of 300 interlocked LED panels constructed atop a more traditionally adaptable space.
The screens transform into a blue sky seen from a barrel-rolling jet, nightfall over a Wyoming ranch, a bank of bureaucratic fluorescents. But they also fill associative roles — the pink of a positive pregnancy test, the captivating galaxy of a sonogram, Jess’s paranoia over the mall’s surveillance cameras, the interface of her bombing console, the indistinguishable “gray putty” of her presumed targets. For a long and unsettling stretch, they offer gleaming renderings of the Reaper’s shiny surfaces that border on garish advertisement.
In the play, the expansive psychological and political stakes of the pilot’s crisis were contained (and intensified) by the staging’s stifling claustrophobia and its shifting suggestions — the thrill of the cockpit, the warmth of the womb, the chill of the prison cell.
Far less is left to the imagination here. And while opera is the art of overdoing, Mayer’s literal widescreen treatment broadens the scope of “Grounded” to the point where the target too often falls out of sight. (This isn’t helped by a runtime that nearly doubles that of the original 75-minute monologue.)
“Grounded” seems to want us to connect more deeply to Jess than we might have to the allegorical outline of The Pilot. It’s her humanity, after all, that causes glitches in her system and betrayals of her training; it’s her love for her daughter, we are wished to believe, that disarms her in several senses. But the opera grants us as clear a view of these developments as Jess has of her targets — it’s one big gray area for us to scan.
Which brings us to another unsettling aspect of “Grounded,” an opera about war and humanity that abstains until the last possible moment to (barely) humanize those on the receiving end of the Reaper’s wrath.
Metropolitan Opera general manager Peter Gelb has referred to “Grounded” as “an antiwar opera,” but it’s hard to understand what he means. Tesori’s music and Brant’s characters often seem to make light of the destruction they level. (The chorus performs a puzzlingly goofy slow-motion “boooom!” to indicate successful strikes.)
And unlike the mysterious form of The Pilot, Jess’s character — who longs to “light up” the world below — never quite earns our fascination or our sympathy (even when she snaps and does the “right” thing). Jess is a mess the whole time, her sudden redemption (and punishment) the cost of an unscheduled intrusion of humanity.
As remotely deployed carnage unfolds for all to see on cable news and social media, and as data reveals drone operators suffering from levels of PTSD comparable to their colleagues in the air, it’s difficult to look at drone warfare in 2023 as some lesser evil, or a chin-stroking abstraction. It’s even harder to consider it an element of someone’s personal identity crisis.
“Grounded” takes passing aim at the rigidity of gender, the weight of motherhood, the cost of freedom and the frailty of human connection, but it doesn’t seem to know its own enemy. War itself never finds its way into the crosshairs, and it feels like a miss.
Grounded runs through Nov. 13 at the Kennedy Center. kennedy-center.org/wno
