Review Roundup: Jeanine Tesori's GROUNDED at the Washington National Opera

Washington National Opera opened its 2023–2024 season with the world premiere of Grounded. Composed by two-time Tony Award® winner Jeanine Tesori with a libretto adapted by George Brant from his eponymous play, and directed by Tony Award® winner Michael Mayer, Grounded is commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera and co-produced with the Washington National Opera.

Grounded tells the story of Jess, an accomplished F-16 fighter pilot who is “grounded” from flying because of an unexpected pregnancy. When returning to duty, she is reassigned to combat by operating lethal drones from a trailer in Las Vegas, thousands of miles away from the battlefield. The juxtaposition of using her elite training to protect and serve America by day while returning to her family at night creates a moral and psychological tension that plays out onstage. Playing the role of Jess is “one of the world’s special young singers” (The New York Times), Emily D’Angelo, in her WNO debut. The cast also includes Joseph Dennis as Eric, Morris Robinson as the Commander, Frederick Ballentine as the Trainer, Kyle Miller as the Sensor, and Teresa Perrotta as Also Jess, with Daniela Candillari conducting the Washington National Opera Orchestra.   

Grounded tackles subjects rarely seen in opera: drone warfare and its impact on service members and their caregivers. When Brant’s play was first staged in 2013, drone warfare was a new technology. Now drones are used commonly on the battlefields and beyond, but their impact is less understood. To present these issues in opera form, Brant expanded his one-woman play into a multi-character libretto, giving full voice to those in the pilot’s orbit. Working with Tesori, Brant created new characters, such as “Also Jess,” who embodies the pilot’s dissociated self, and a male chorus called the “Drone Squadron,” a haunted group reflecting the history of combat.  

The set, designed by Tony Award® winner Mimi Lien, is comprised of two huge screens made from 224 and 84 individual LED panels across the floor and the ceiling. These panels are mapped with integrated software for real-time video and projection effects to immerse audiences in the psychological and social implications of remote warfare.

Let's see what the critics have to say!

Zachary Woolfe, NY Times: But “Grounded” is more surreal — and eventually psychotic — material, and Tesori and Brant don’t pursue Jess’s dissolving mental state with the relentlessness, economy or extremity of, say, Berg’s “Wozzeck.” While it’s understandable that the Met would want a single-actor play expanded into something more traditionally grand, the bagginess is palpable in the transition from an 80-minute monologue to a two-and-a-half-hour opera.

Charles T. Downey, Classical Review: Both acts dragged, making for what felt like a long night in the theater, but was only 2-1/2 hours. If you think tracking remote targets for hours as a drone pilot is boring, try watching an opera about it. Even worse was an aria about making a PowerPoint slide presentation.

Michael Andor Brodeur, Washington Post: Far less is left to the imagination here. And while opera is the art of overdoing, Mayer’s literal widescreen treatment broadens the scope of “Grounded” to the point where the target too often falls out of sight. (This isn’t helped by a runtime that nearly doubles that of the original 75-minute monologue.)

David Friscic, BroadwayWorld:  To this opera’s advantage, the very textured music of the deservedly lauded composer Jeanine Tesori is alternately sweeping, plaintive, elegiac, whimsical, satiric, mocking, poetic or emphatic (as the libretto and mood delineated) and underpins the more polemical and didactic strains of the opera with an adroit tone. Tesori’s music deftly underpinned the more expository scenes in act one of the opera as well as the disorienting aspects of the psychological disintegration and stress of the main character in act two (while also illuminating the horrifying reality of killing from a technical device operated thousands of miles away from a perceived target).

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