Jeanine Tesori’s new opera ‘Grounded’ is a call to moral accountability

Top, Greer Grimsley, bottom, Emily D’Angelo, Ben Bliss / Met Opera

Benjamin Britten’s Owen Wingrave is one of the few openly anti-war operas. Robert Kurka’s The Good Soldier Schweik might be another. Other operas treat the subject warily, such as Huang Ruo’s An American Solider, centering anti-Chinese racism in the U.S. Army. Tragic operas such as Verdi’s Macbeth, Aïda, La Forza del Destino, not to overlook Prokofiev’s War and Peace and Berg’s Wozzeck, treat war as an inevitable result of human ambition while showing a degree of empathy with the conscripted soldiers who are forced to fight and die for their rulers.

Grounded, the latest opera by Jeanine Tesori, falls into a midway category—not anti-war as such (although some, like myself, would choose to read it that way), but at the very least showing the tragic street-level “collateral damage” resulting from decisions made far away by unseen cyber-art masters of war. In the case of Tesori’s protagonist, an American fighter pilot named Jess, her role in modern warfare “dropping vengeance from the sky” drives her into near-insanity. Or perhaps one could put it another way: She only starts to regain her sanity when she disobeys procedure to spare the life of an innocent little girl in Afghanistan who all too closely resembles her own daughter Samantha here at home. She pays for her breakthrough of “wokeness” with a court martial and a prison sentence. She is finally “grounded” in her moral conscience.

Two-time Tony Award–winning composer Jeanine Tesori’s powerful opera was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera and based on George Brant’s acclaimed one-woman play. Brant went on to rewrite his play, also called Grounded, as a libretto with added characters. It enjoyed the distinction of being the 2024-25 season’s opening night offering, a bold statement of confidence in the work and composer. It was the Met’s first opening-night opera ever composed by a woman. This opera, along with composer Missy Mazzoli’s forthcoming Lincoln in the Bardo, are the first two operas by women that the Metropolitan Opera has commissioned. Up until now the Met had only staged two other operas by women: Ethel M. Smyth’s one-act Der Wald in 1903, and Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin in 2016.

The Met co-produced Grounded with Washington National Opera, which staged it first, in 2023. The lead, Jess, is a tour-de-force role, and was performed in both the world premiere and at the Met by mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo, for whom Tesori wrote it. The only other repeat role is that of Sensor, the cameraman Jess teams up with in a trailer in Las Vegas, performed by Kyle Miller. He is only 19 and not an enlisted man, but a hotshot, prize-winning gamesman recruited for this highly specialized military assignment, “getting paid for what I do anyway.” Jess and Sensor spend their 12-hour shifts together, he manipulating the high-definition camera from the drone high above the military’s potential targets, and she identifying her prey and ordering the bombs to be released. “You can’t hide from the eyes in the sky,” they sing. “I saved a convoy today,” she reports to Eric when she gets home, “from the safety of a La-Z-Boy.”

There’s a back-story to how and why Jess finds herself in this trailer. In the first act we meet her at the peak of her life’s ambition as an F-16 fighter pilot in the United States Air Force. She’s the only woman in her squadron. She exults in the ecstasy of flying through the vast skies over Iraq and other war zones, leveling palaces, refineries, power plants. “Boom goes Basra! Boom goes Baghdad!” She revels in the “blue,” a word repeated over and over, which is curious, almost an advertisement for her previous opera, Blue, a moving story involving police violence and its effects on the family of a cop.

On a break between missions, she relaxes at a popular bar in Wyoming, prepared to set out the next day on assignment. At the bar she meets a handsome charmer, Eric, a fourth-generation rancher “grounded” to his land, and they go back to his home for a night of escapist sex. When she discovers she’s pregnant, and refuses to abort, she is removed from cockpit duty “after everything I’ve worked for.” Her Commander calls her “a waste of training and taxpayer money.” Jess presents herself to Eric without expectation, just to see if the flicker of a one night’s stand might be taken further. They rekindle their love affair, now “grounded” with a baby girl Samantha (Sam for short). When Sam is about five, Jess sees “we’re losing in Afghanistan” and feels the pull to rejoin the Air Force and resume her military career.

But by then the face of war has changed dramatically. And that’s what brings her to the “Chair Force,” a trailer on a base in Las Vegas, operating a Reaper drone halfway around the world, now over Afghanistan. Eric and Sam move to Vegas to keep the family together, and he becomes a card dealer at a casino. Now she can enjoy “war with all the benefits of home…the threat of death has been removed.” Her drive for excellence puts pressure on her multiple roles as soldier, wife and mother. The psychological toll of modern warfare occurs not only on the battleground, but also here, thousands of miles away. Everyone down below looks guilty to Jess and Sensor, subjects to smite down. There’s only so much you can do, she realizes as she begins to disintegrate, to “compartmentalize your life.”

The production itself, directed by Michael Mayer, is a masterpiece of theatrical magic. A horizontally split stage shows us the skies above, the view below from the drone, and the domestic and workplace environments of home, bar and trailer. The contrast between endless skies and the cramped, claustrophobic trailer is stunning. One dance scene of pilots staged seemingly on the wing of a plane made me think of the film Flying Down to Rio.

Met Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducted at the Met, leading a cast that also featured tenor Ben Bliss as the Wyoming rancher, and Greer Grimsley as Jess’ Commander. As Jess begins to question her role and her life, she hallucinates to the point of interfering with her work. She is joined by an Also Jess, soprano Ellie Dehn, who acts as Jess’ alter ego, allowing Jess to express her inner distress and trauma in dialogues with herself. I was reminded that in Tesori’s musical Fun Home, the protagonist, lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel, appears on stage at three ages simultaneously.

The opera is staged in two acts, 60 and 50 minutes respectively. Between the two productions in Washington, D.C., and New York, the librettist and composer cut about 45 minutes from the opera.

While the opera does not tackle head-on the wars Jess is fighting, it will surely provoke such questioning in the audience—about moral ambiguity at the very least. It was not so pointedly anti-war to stop General Dynamics from generously underwriting the opera, the aerospace manufacturer and defense contractor, and maker of the F-16, the fighter plane which Jess had piloted in the first act. The Met has certainly added an important contribution to the discussion about the role of opera in this century.

Jeanine Tesori (b. 1961) is the most prolific female composer in American theater history. Her stage credits include the Tony Award–winning Best Musicals Kimberly Akimbo and Fun Home. She also wrote the scores to Shrek the Musical, Soft Power, Caroline or Change, and Violet, among others.

Grounded played at the Met from Sept. 23 to Oct. 19. I was able to see it in a Los Angeles movie theatre on a Met HD broadcast.

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CONTRIBUTOR

Eric A. Gordon

Eric A. Gordon, People’s World Cultural Editor, wrote a biography of radical American composer Marc Blitzstein and co-authored composer Earl Robinson’s autobiography. He has received numerous awards for his People's World writing from the International Labor Communications Association. He has translated all nine books of fiction by Manuel Tiago (pseudonym for Álvaro Cunhal) from Portuguese, available from International Publishers NY.