Moral Complexity at the Met: Jeanine Tesori’s Grounded
The Metropolitan Opera opened its season Monday with the company premiere of Grounded, with a score by Jeanine Tesori and a libretto by George Brant. Theater critic Sara Holdren and music critic Justin Davidson discussed how the opera deals with the intimate story of a fighter pilot who gets pregnant, spends five years as a housewife and mother, and then rejoins the Air Force only to find that warfare has changed and she will have to change with it.
Justin Davidson: Sara, I’ve been waiting for the right occasion to double-team an opera, and this is the perfect opportunity because George Brant reworked his own one-woman play into the libretto for Grounded, and because the composer, Jeanine Tesori, comes out of the theater world. The Met’s been trying to leverage that cross-disciplinary wealth of talent for years — what’s your take on how that worked out in this case?
Sara Holdren: I was really compelled by the first act. It felt muscular and brisk — I know the show’s artistic team has done a lot of cutting and shaping since the Washington National Opera premiere last year, and in Act One, it showed. We get such a strong establishing image of the protagonist, a fighter pilot named Jess — not only her feelings of pure power and freedom when she’s flying but also the rough-and-tumble, drunk-all-night-sleep-all-day lifestyle she falls into when she’s on solid ground. And I think we’re really primed to be reading something deeply sinister into all of that from the start.
J.D.: I agree, it opens like a jet taking off from an aircraft carrier: instantly airborne.
S.H.: The score even begins with this low buzz and timpani rumble that sounds like an engine revving up. And speaking of engines — the mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo really gives the production a terrific one, doesn’t she?
J.D.: She’s an operatic Maserati. And Tesori supplies her with a relentless tour de force. The first note we hear her sing is a fortissimo high A-flat, which is both near the top of the mezzo-soprano range and smack in the middle of D’Angelo’s zone of power. That moment must be scary as hell: You’re singing the first performance of a new opera, the orchestra and chorus practically drop out, and you’re hanging out there, totally exposed.
S.H.: D’Angelo has such a great way with language — she uses words for meaning, not just as conveyors of sound (which should be a given but isn’t always so with opera singers). I can hear her consonants, all the crunchy, chewy, crisp stuff, not just her big open vowels.
J.D.: And she doesn’t let up for two whole acts. She barely even gets offstage. The emotional intensity is virtually always cranked high, which is tiring for the audience, let alone the singer, but D’Angelo pulled it off. It made me wonder whether Tesori has spent a lot of time with Richard Strauss’s Elektra.
S.H.: She also has a great physicality for Jess, a chest-up toughness and just enough swagger. Brant apparently wrote the play after he came across this photo of the real fighter pilot, Stephanie Kelsen, in her flight suit and very pregnant, and even though the opera fills out the world around Jess, she still has to shoulder the whole thing. Especially as the story becomes more internal and she becomes more unstable in the second act.
J.D.: On the other hand, reshaping Grounded as an opera isn’t just a matter of translating a solo show into a much bigger format; it’s also that the Met’s stage and auditorium are so physically big it can be challenging for directors to do their best work. How do you feel about that jump in scale?
S.H.: It’s true — I’m never not struck by how massive it is. Sixty ensemble members thundering at you from up in the air on the raked middle platform of Mimi Lien’s set, and it hardly feels loud. But overall, I thought Lien and Michael Mayer, the director, really pulled off the big zoom-out required by the leap into opera and by the Met stage (with a serious assist from the projection designers Jason H. Thompson and Kaitlyn Pietras). The way Lien splits the Met’s towering vertical space into strata — these tilted screens and floating raked floor that give a sense of the ascension and vastness Jess yearns for and that eventually go through this really chilling moment of becoming what they actually are. When those screens, which have been sky and cityscape and wind and texture the whole time, are suddenly just screens, the screens Jess is looking at as she flies her drone, that made my stomach turn. But now, let me turn your question around: How does this adaptation work for you as music drama?
J.D.: It’s good to see the first woman composer to open the Met season do so with a work about a woman fighter pilot. Misogyny is so deeply baked into the art form’s history that I hoped that combination would be more disruptive of the tradition. I was disappointed by that.
S.H.: How so?
J.D.: One reason is the basic structure of the opera, which is fairly classic: the heroic woman who could have accomplished so much but is derailed by sex. Then she complains a lot until she does something self-sacrificing and out of bounds.
S.H.: That’s fascinating!
J.D.: A nice way of saying “That’s wrong!”
S.H.: Ha! Well, I didn’t think about her gender at all except inasmuch as her pregnancy is the inciting incident, the event which physically “grounds” her. There’s a moment later when her husband, Eric, sings about being grounded in a different sense by their relationship and their child — now his “feet are firmly planted on the ground” — and I really appreciated that additional layer of meaning.
J.D.: I suppose part of my reaction might have been to a directorial choice rather than something intrinsic to the work. We get our first glimpse of Jess during the overture when she briefly, wordlessly appears in handcuffs and white prison scrubs before changing into her flight suit. That’s the equivalent of the white nightgown in which so many female opera protagonists sing their dying arias just before the final curtain. We’re not even 30 seconds into the show, and already I can make out a mad scene on the horizon.
S.H.: I certainly saw that we’d be returning to the image of her as a prisoner, that the whole piece would be the story of “how we ended up here” — very current Netflix series: Cold open … TWO MONTHS EARLIER … But I didn’t immediately start thinking of Lucia di Lammermoor. It’s funny, this tradition of the soprano “mad scene” in opera; it feels as if Tesori and D’Angelo have a lot to fight against there, albeit unfairly.
J.D.: What do you make of Jess’s trajectory from ace to insubordinate inmate? Are we supposed to conclude that being a woman pilot means she’s more likely to (a) go crazy, (b) develop a conscience, or (c) see killing differently when there’s a child literally in the picture. It all seems very essentialist.
S.H.: That question of essentialism only comes in because the show, as it gets into Act Two, isn’t as effective as it could be in really tracking what’s happening to the character. If you’re entirely clear in her arc and swept along by it, then your mind isn’t wandering to whether something is a gender stereotype.
J.D.: Yes, I agree that the second act is much less focused.
S.H.: I went into intermission full of a kind of awful intensity, a weird mixture of excitement and dread and the shame and guilt that Jess herself hasn’t yet experienced. I was so ready for the show to take full advantage of all that in Act Two — to really burst the storm cloud it had built up inside me. That didn’t end up happening. It tried, but it lost too much of its clarity and drive to really bring the devastation home.
J.D.: I think that’s partly a dramatic problem and partly a musical one.
S.H.: Say more about the music.
J.D.: There are a lot of musical touchstones, so many they fly by like a spray of gravel. Baroque brass fanfares, filtered through 19th century symphonic grandiosity. Hints of Copland in his heartland open-skies mode when we meet Eric, the Wyoming cowboy with whom Jess spends a fateful night of passion. (And the loose-limbed, velvet-voiced tenor Ben Bliss gets the open-range style just right.) Clanging Stravinsky-ish chords and skittering muted trumpets. Tesori knows her history well enough to dip into it at will, but at times I wondered whether her real inspiration wasn’t John Williams.
S.H.: But Williams is fantastic —
J.D.: Oh, absolutely! He’s a master synthesist, and Tesori is no slouch. I found her musical characterization of Jess convincing as far as it went. But in the long run, the relationship between the score and the story becomes increasingly diffuse. That’s one reason the second act drags.
S.H.: I think you’re right — and a related reason has to do with the character Ellie Dehn is singing. The program calls her “Also Jess”: She’s a kind of shadow self to D’Angelo’s Jess, and she appears when Jess begins her stint in the “chair force,” dropping bombs on “bad guys” in Iraq from a bunker in Las Vegas. “War with all the benefits of home,” goes the nauseating refrain — but really, it’s the opposite. Jess’s self splits because what she’s actually experiencing is home with all the brutalities of war. There’s such a lot of potential in this idea, but that potential is mostly wasted. As the second act advances, it’s unclear what Dehn’s other Jess really represents; her presence muddies things rather than sharpening them.
J.D.: Is she the product of a dissociative episode?
S.H.: Right, is she Gollum or Sméagol or what? I think this all goes back to some ineffectual ambiguities in Brant’s original play. It’s like there’s this seed in the story he’s telling, and it’s such an interesting one but no one is fully watering it: That seed is the awakening of a moral center and the question of whether it’s even able to awaken without destroying the person.
J.D.: The technology of killing lays bare the ethics of killing.
S.H.: Yes. There’s no more hiding behind concepts like glory and honor and camaraderie, or the romanticism of flight. When Brant wrote the play, drone warfare was brand new. There are stories about audiences Googling after they saw the show to find out if drones were actually real. Now, we can see what our tax dollars are doing every day, and it’s all death. And so to watch this woman who loves her life, who has never even thought to question things outside the cockpit, and then to see how her physical removal from the act of killing in fact plunges her deeper into the horror that was always there — it sits so heavy in the chest.
J.D.: I’m glad you pointed out how much more we know and how feelings have changed about drone warfare since Brant wrote the play.
S.H.: Back in 2017, he wasn’t even personally opposed to drone warfare on an ethical level — which feels like one reason the play slips into ambivalence.
J.D.: I wonder if they’ve changed again. I feel the opera takes it for granted that the audience has internalized the moral equation of “Reaper drone = Evil,” but honestly, I’m not sure that’s really so self-evident. In fact, in the opera we see the ability to limit civilian casualties. The climactic moment undercuts itself, weakening the drama of the finale.
S.H.: That’s because there’s an essential fuzziness around what Jess’s moral trajectory actually is: Is it a more contained, ultimately more cynical (from the writer’s perspective) activation of conscience, the kind that happens only because you start to relate to the enemy or the other? Or is it a bigger awakening — the kind that blows your soul open to the great evil that’s being perpetrated and to your part in it? I admit I’m so much more interested in the latter. It’s what I feel lurking in the opera and what I want to hit me in the gut at the end, but I don’t think it’s what currently happens.
J.D.: We haven’t talked much about the visual aspect of the production. Since it revolves around a warrior who spends her days dealing death from a La-Z-Boy, a lot of the action is quite static, but there’s some good dancing and it all plays out against a lot of video projections. I was struck by one particular choice: We’re constantly being told how vividly Jess is forced to witness the death and dismemberment she wreaks in high definition — a fundamental difference from the life of a pilot, who drops bombs and vanishes before the boom. It’s that clarity that starts to addle her mind. But the videos are so grainy and pixelated I wasn’t sure whether we were watching the redacted version of what she sees or if we were in her head watching reality dissolve.
S.H.: I’ve heard that in the D.C. production, the video of what Jess is seeing on the ground — the “gray desert” with its convoys and Jeeps and little white smudges of people — was all much more high-res. We could more accurately see each object she was seeing. Theatrically, I prefer the Met’s version: It feels to me like the more literal interpretation would totally pull us away from Jess. We’d just be watching TV, not her — which is already a risk with a set almost entirely made out of giant screens. For me, the grainy approach to the drone imagery felt in keeping with the abstracted nature of the projections. When we see Las Vegas outside Jess and Eric’s little bungalow, the image is all strips of light and color, broken apart and woven back together. Las Vegas by Gerhard Richter. Similarly, I loved the moments when the massive, tilted panels of Lien’s set were suffused with different tones of a certain hue, as if the sky were a massive Rothko.
J.D.: That’s a great description. And of course there’s a very meaningful exception to all that fuzziness.
S.H.: Right, the one projected image we ever see in complete clarity, total realistic detail, is the drone — that $28 million monstrosity rising up behind Jess’s commander with its wingspan filling the entire stage. It doesn’t look real. But not only is it real, it’s old tech at this point. I found that pretty terrifying.
J.D.: Since that climactic moment is visually so powerful and comes wrapped in forceful orchestration, why do you think we both felt let down by the moments that follow it?
S.H.: Because by the show’s final movement, things have started to feel contrived. If I could really track the arc of a full and devastating awakening of conscience (and, really, social consciousness), I could more readily buy Jess’s final wild decision, which we won’t spoil. But right now, both the fact and the details of it feel unearned and implausible.
J.D.: I was having the same Come on! thoughts. Which I absolutely shouldn’t have been having in the final seconds of the show.
S.H.: This is where it undermines its own potential, trapping Jess in a scenario where it’s really hard to get away from those gender stereotypes: Oh, she’s a mom looking at a little girl — that’s why she cracks. Rather than: She’s a human whose humanity is, after a lifetime of dormancy, experiencing an excruciating growth spurt. It leaves her feeling small at the end — still trapped in moral solipsism, not just in literal jail — when she should feel expanded, exploded open, awake.
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