Grounded
What does it feel like to bring war home? Does home start to seem like a battlefield of its own? And do enemy combatants begin to resemble, from a distance, your own friends and family? These are all questions explored by Grounded, a new opera by two-time Tony Award–winning composer Jeanine Tesori, with a libretto by playwright George Brant. Commissioned by the Met, developed by the Metropolitan Opera / Lincoln Center Theater New Works Program, and adapted from Brant’s eponymous play, Grounded follows Jess, a hotshot fighter pilot whose unplanned pregnancy takes her out of the cockpit and lands her in Las Vegas, operating a Reaper drone halfway around the world.
The opera arrives at the Met in a bold staging by acclaimed director Michael Mayer that evokes the technological and military apparatuses in which Jess finds herself trapped. Using a vast array of LED screens that present a variety of perspectives on the action, including the drone’s predatory view from high above, the production chronicles how Jess, portrayed by mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo, struggles to adjust to this new, 21st-century way of doing battle as she fights to maintain her sanity—and her soul—when ordered to rain down death by remote control.
This guide approaches Grounded as a work that wrestles with the ethical quandaries and psychological toll of modern warfare, especially as they intersect with questions of gender and family. It will enable students and educators to gain deeper knowledge of the history and politics of military drone technology, struggles for women’s inclusion in the armed forces, the consequences of high-stakes decision-making, and Tesori’s kaleidoscopic musical world, ranging from jazz and pop to Broadway and opera. In so doing, the information on the following pages will equip readers to consider how our collective reliance on technology can distort—and even detach us from—the world around us.
