‘Grounded’ Review: An Opera on War Waged at a Distance

Composer Jeanine Tesori and librettist George Brant’s world premiere at the Washington National Opera follows a female fighter pilot who is reassigned to flying drones.

By 

Heidi Waleson

Oct. 31, 2023 at 5:16 pm ET

A scene from ‘Grounded’

PHOTO: SCOTT SUCHMAN/THE KENNEDY CENTER

Washington

‘Grounded,” a two-act opera by Jeanine Tesori and George Brant, which had its world premiere at the Washington National Opera on Saturday, is based on a 2013 monodrama by Mr. Brant in which an Air Force fighter pilot recounts her mental and emotional disintegration after she is reassigned to flying drones. The new version had to be bigger—it was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera, which will present it next season—so Mr. Brant expanded his text for the libretto, skillfully fleshing out the characters and context in the pilot’s narrative. But the transformation of the pilot—called Jess in the opera—is what matters, and with the backstory adding extra weight, especially in Act 1, the drama takes too long to catch fire. It’s a surprising lapse from Ms. Tesori, composer of such wholly gripping theater pieces as the opera “Blue” and the musicals “Fun Home,” “Kimberly Akimbo” and “Caroline, or Change.”

We first meet Jess (the intense, passionate mezzo Emily D’Angelo) standing at the apex of a triangle of fighter pilots. An ecstatic chorus and aria demonstrate their camaraderie, Jess’s triumphant success in a male world, and her joy in flying in “the Blue”; the military atmosphere is intensified with drum rolls and trumpet calls. Ensuing scenes detail the events that remove her from that fellowship: While on leave in Wyoming, she meets Eric; gets pregnant and is grounded due to regulations barring pregnant women from flying; joins Eric on his family ranch, where she marries him, gives birth to a baby girl, Sam, and spends eight years before deciding she wants to fly again. But war is now different: Jess is assigned to fly a $17 million Reaper drone from a trailer in Las Vegas. She will stare at a screen for 12 hours a day, seven days a week, and go home to her family at night. As her Commander puts it, “War with all the benefits of home.”

Emily D’Angelo

PHOTO: SCOTT SUCHMAN/THE KENNEDY CENTER

We’re now two-thirds of the way into Act 1, and things finally get interesting. The pilot fellowship is replaced by the Sensor, a jaunty, 19-year-old ex-gamer in a sweatshirt assigned to monitor the drone’s “thousand eyes”; the disembodied, processed voices of the Kill Chain supervisors that come through Jess’s headset; and the Drone Squadron, a new male chorus that represents the increasingly disturbing echoes of her own thoughts. The bright musical evocation of the thrill of flying in “the Blue” is replaced by hisses and an ominous, repeated brass motif, in keeping with Jess’s gray screen that shows convoys crawling through a desert 8,000 miles away. The creepy Kill Chain voices tell Jess to “linger” above them; the Drone Squadron declares “Everything is witnessed” and proclaims the targets “Guilty Jeeps, guilty camels, guilty convoys, guilty sand.”

In Act 2, we burrow deeper into Jess’s head and her growing inability to differentiate between work and home as the idea of surveillance takes over her life. A trip to the mall has her looking for cameras; she confuses her nightly drive through the Nevada desert with the vehicles she tracks on screen; her dissociated self, called Also Jess, watches her as she obsessively watches her new target, No. 2 on the war hit list, waiting for him to leave his car so she can positively identify and kill him. The voices of the Drone Squadron become more insistent, encouraging her delusions and shutting out the last vestiges of her real life. The technicolor, Copland-esque lyricism of Jess’s earlier life with her family gives way to more unstable harmonies as Ms. Tesori steadily builds the musical tension toward Jess’s climactic act and its consequences.

Morris Robinson (above) and Ms. D’Angelo, Willa Cook and Joseph Dennis PHOTO: SCOTT SUCHMAN/THE KENNEDY CENTER

Ms. D’Angelo commanded the stage even as her character disintegrated. As Also Jess, the only other adult woman in the show, soprano Teresa Perrotta floated in a higher tessitura; their duet after Jess and Eric make love in Act 2 was a particularly striking moment, as were the scenes that layered Jess’s line into the various male choruses. Tenor Joseph Dennis was affecting as Eric, especially in his efforts to bring Jess back to reality, but his arias and the extended scenes of their budding relationship in Act 1 went on too long. Bass Morris Robinson brought gruff authority to the Commander; tenor Frederick Ballentine exuded enthusiasm as the Trainer who introduces the grounded pilots to the drone; baritone Kyle Miller was refreshingly irreverent as the Sensor. Willa Cook was poignant as Jess’s beloved daughter, Sam, the root of her emotional confusion between work and life. Conductor Daniela Candillari expertly rendered Ms. Tesori’s colorful orchestration, which never covered the singers and sometimes stopped altogether, and the all-male choruses ably delineated their different roles, whether they were drunken pilots in a bar, mall denizens, or the sinister Drone Squadron.

A scene from ‘Grounded’

PHOTO: SCOTT SUCHMAN/THE KENNEDY CENTER

The production cleverly established Jess’s two worlds and their gradual melding. In Mimi Lien’s set, the military side was created by LED screens—floor, back wall and ceiling—seeming to float in midair, with Jess and Eric’s suburban house and other locations on solid ground below. Vivid LED projections by Kaitlyn Pietras and Jason H. Thompson took us from the rolling clouds and blue sky of the opening scene to images of the drone and a blown-up image of Jess’s trailer screen, depicting the gray landscape with its topographical contours, the drone’s positioning charts and numerical data, and the white explosions of the missiles she launches.

Sometimes the eye of the camera turned to the people on the stage, projecting multiple images of them in the same gray tones, suggesting the omnipresence of surveillance. Jess took the Sensor’s seat in the trailer when she drove her car through the desert and the background projections changed, but we felt her impression of the similarity of the two locations. Lighting designer Kevin Adamshelped to evoke Jess’s dislocation; Tom Broecker’s apt costumes included the flight suit that symbolizes Jess’s identity plus Eric’s rancher outfit and his gaudy red vest, the uniform of the casino blackjack dealer that he becomes. Michael Mayer was the precise director, building a clear narrative about the personal consequences of war, especially when the waging of it is outsourced to technology.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).