A decade after the Met Opera commissioned composer Janine Tesori—the first woman in the company’s history to receive such a commission—Grounded has finally landed at Lincoln Center. Tesori and librettist George Brant (who also wrote the play upon which the opera is based) delivered a story of surveillance, guilt and motherhood, centered around a female fighter pilot who finds herself unable to do what she is clearly made for and goes mad because of it. It is also a story about the gradual awakening of a woman’s conscience as she reckons with her own participation in America’s military machine.
When we meet Jess, she is brash and proud. She loves her job, loves the endless blue of the sky and loves the destruction she rains down like an avenging angel. She’s an adrenaline junkie with a sizable god complex but flies away before she has to see the destruction close-up. An unexpected pregnancy drags her back down to earth, stymying her career but giving her a sexy, supportive husband and adorable toddler in exchange. It’s not enough, and the U.S. is losing in Iraq, so Jess returns to an Air Force she no longer recognizes. She’s barred from her outdated plane and instead taught to fly drones. The Air Force calls them Reapers, and grim they are.
Resigned to the “Chair Force,” Jess spends twelve hours each day in a cushy leather chair, watching as faraway gray figures in a gray desert explode in plumes of gray fire. For Jess, drone warfare is both numbingly impersonal—her safety is never threatened, she kills with a click—and horribly visceral; the cameras are so precise that she can see the faces of her targets and see their limbs bursting apart as the missiles hit.
Jess’s psyche begins to splinter; she imagines herself watched by unseen eyes as the boundaries between war and home blur. Another version of herself emerges, splitting her into two people. This other Jess feels like the ghost of her former ace-pilot self. Unable to follow an order that would kill both her target and a small child, Jess breaks down, self-destructing in spectacular fashion. In the process, she locates a piece of her soul.
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Staged on Mimi Lien’s split set—the bottom half a snug homey box, the top a vertigo-inducing raked stage—with stylish projection by Jason H. Thompson and Kaitlyn Petras, Grounded is a good-looking show, if not a dazzling one. Brief glimpses of handheld camera work double down on Jess’s paranoia, while Michael Meyer’s direction is unobtrusive, mostly getting out of the way of the actors.
Brant’s play, which ran at the Public in 2013 with Anne Hathaway as the Pilot, is a one-woman show. Like his libretto, the play is often clipped, fragmentary and emphatic. Jess’s mind is the only space we enter. The opera leans instead into Jess as an uneasy part of a collective; first as the only woman in the chorus of macho Top-Gun types (of which she is undoubtedly one), and then as the only woman in a chorus of bloodless drone operators. But neither her skill nor her swagger can make her fit in when it matters—the moment she becomes pregnant, Jess is forcibly reminded that she’s a woman first and a fighter pilot second. Her choice to keep the pregnancy is surprising and unexplained, falling into the familiar trope where a career woman raises and then immediately banishes the possibility of abortion without any insight into her thought process. In another familiar move, having a daughter softens the otherwise tough-as-nails Jess and forces her to humanize her targets, making it so she can no longer see them as only guilty and in need of her divine wrath. Returning to her happy family in the evenings only exacerbates the issue: she remarks at one point that The Odyssey would be a very different book “if Odysseus came home each night.” While Brant’s message about modern warfare is still trenchant, it likely hit harder a decade ago. In an era where drone warfare is ubiquitous, and we offer ourselves up willingly to surveillance in almost all parts of our lives, Grounded’s critiques feel a little behind the times, as does its use of motherhood as a plot point. The long runway from commission to premiere means that such issues compound as the culture changes around a text.
Musically, however, Grounded satisfies more fully. Tesori’s score is eclectic and ever-changing. Her chorus work is strong; the fighter pilots sing with raucous, dissonant fervor, while the drone ops sing in angelic, shimmery harmony. It’s hard to pick which one is more frightening. Minimalist-inflected arpeggios met moments of tender lyricism, tightly intertwined duets between Jess and her other self felt firmly contemporary, while men’s chorus parts sometimes recalled Britten. Especially exciting: when Jess places her headset on, a chattering chorus of disembodied operators overwhelm the sound-world before shifting imperceptibly into a percussion solo for the orchestra (here Palmer Heffernan’s sound design work is also to be praised).
The entire piece is elevated by a uniformly strong cast. Mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo is marvelous as Jess, turning in a fierce and sensitive performance that smoothed and deepened Brant’s fragment-laden libretto. Her voice slid from knife-edged clarity to searing pathos with supple ease. As her relentlessly supportive and wonderful husband Eric, Ben Bliss sounded lovely (especially when he ditched his Wyoming drawl), his cool, silvery tenor caressing a lullaby or revealing the worry and exhaustion under Eric’s placid exterior. Baritone Kyle Miller, as Jess’s teenaged drone camera operator, was charismatic and charming, with a warm, supple sound that he was able to maintain through bites of Twizzlers and sips of Mountain Dew (never have I seen this much junk food on the Met stage). Ellie Dehn as Jess’s alternate self, has a refreshing, vibrant soprano, and I only wish she had had more material to sing. Greer Grimsley makes a few brief and powerful appearances as Jess’s gruff commanding officer. As the first of what I hope will be many more operas by female composers to take flight at the Met, Grounded is a solid outing.
