Review: Jeanine Tesori's Grounded, the Story of a Mom/Drone Pilot, at the Metropolitan Opera

America’s next big war will be fought largely through unmanned drones. We can see that already in Ukraine, where relatively low-cost drones are deployed daily by both the Russian and Ukrainian armies. Lose one and the pilot, sitting in an office far from the front line, survives to fly another day. He (or she) can even commute to battle — a new development in the history of warfare.

“It would be a different book,” sings Jess (Emily D’Angelo), “If Odysseus came home ev’ry day.” She’s a fighter pilot turned drone operator and the protagonist in Jeanine Tesori’s Grounded, which just opened the new season at the Metropolitan Opera. It’s a star turn for D’Angelo in an important and challenging new work from one of America’s most prolific composers (Tesori is the Tony-winning songwriter of Fun Home and Kimberly Akimbo). If only director Michael Mayer’s sleepy production could fully harness its potential, Grounded would soar.

Librettist George Brant adapted the story from his eponymous solo drama, which performed with Hannah Cabell in 2014 and Anne Hathaway in 2015, adding a whole squadron of characters we never saw off-Broadway. There is the chorus of fly boys who pummel Iraq alongside Jess. And there’s Eric (Ben Bliss), the handsome cowboy with whom she has a consequential fling. A pregnancy sidelines her from the Air Force, but five years later, when her daughter has grown, Jess’s Commander (a formidable Greer Grimsley) calls her back for a job in what she derisively calls the “chair force.”

She moves the whole family to Las Vegas, where she serves 12-hour shifts piloting a Reaper drone flying over Afghanistan. A 19-year-old video game wiz is her sensor (the curly haired, Slurpee-guzzling Kyle Miller brings real authenticity to this role). Meanwhile, Eric gets a job at the Luxor. They look like an average American family with one kid and two incomes.

But the cameras on the drones are excellent, providing a level of intimacy with the enemy that Jess never experienced when she was actually flying over her targets — and it messes with her head. Eric advises her to “clap off the game,” as he does every time he leaves the casino. But that’s easy for him to say: He’s dealing blackjack; she’s dealing death.

Tesori’s score beautifully captures the complex shades of light and dark in this story about a woman with one foot in the suburbs and another in a far-away theater of war. Lush strings and angelic vocals wrap us in a world of warmth and sweetness, which can suddenly sour without warning.

For instance, the second act opens with a chorus of food vendors inviting us to linger in the shopping mall where it is “cool and safe,” the last word held with a sustained A, which wobbles from sharp to flat and back again, letting us know that this promise of safety is not to be trusted. And sure enough, that is when Jess notices that she’s being surveilled by cameras, much like the ones she uses to hunt down terrorists in Tora Bora.

D’Angelo takes us on a psychological journey with her powerful mezzo-soprano. When we meet her, she is a modern-day Valkyrie who moves comfortably in a male-dominated world and avoids sentiment like the plague. But her tone softens (though her voice never weakens) as she becomes a mother. And her ambivalence about fighting this war (against other mothers and fathers) from an airconditioned office in Nevada manifests itself in a second Jess (the gorgeously expressive soprano Ellie Dehn) who sings with her conflicted primary. Those moments are beguiling, but the duets between D’Angelo and Bliss are even lovelier, easily conveying a relationship built on trust and mutual affection.

With the Met orchestra under the baton of the unflappably steady Yannick Nézet-Séguin, this musically adventurous and technically difficult new opera gets its best hearing. If you were only listening on the radio, you would have no qualms.

The weakness in Grounded mostly derives from Mayer’s staging, which relies heavily on projections (by Jason H. Thompson and Kaitlyn Pietras) and is hamstrung by Mimi Lien’s hulking set. It elevates the chorus high off the stage, which is striking in the opening moments, as projected clouds fly behind them. But Lien stuffs Jess and Eric’s house under this central platform, giving the impression that they live in a cave. The ceilings are so low, with important scenes staged beneath them, that I wondered if anyone in the Family Circle could see.

And while the projections exude cutting-edge video technology, they fail on dramaturgical grounds. Jess sings about how she can see “faces” and “blood” and “chunks of bone” through her screen, but all we in the audience see are black-and-white blurs. Perhaps Mayer and his design team didn’t want to offend the well-heeled patrons at the Met with all that gore, but this is the opera company that opened its last season with a close-up shot of a lethal injection. I think they’ll live, and if they’re shareholders of Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, or General Dynamics (as a sizable chunk of the opening night audience surely are) they ought to have some idea what they’re investing in.

The climax of Grounded is certainly as dramatic as anything in opera since Tosca hurled herself from the Castel Sant’Angelo, but the impact of the moment is muted by the lack of build-up in the second act. An airplane might be able to taxi for an hour and then suddenly hurtle down the runway, but operas rarely can.

All that makes Grounded a flawed presentation of a necessary and vital new work. As the 21^st century progresses, drones and high-tech surveillance will become even greater parts of our lives — and our wars. Grounded is merely the first opera to recognize it.