The Met Commissioned Jeanine Tesori to Write an Opera. She Picked George Brant’s Grounded As Inspiration

What do we owe to those who fight and kill in our name? What is the psychological cost of being at the controls as destruction rains down from above? And how can one woman succeed in combat, romance, and motherhood all at the same time? These are the questions posed by Jeanine Tesori and George Brant’s powerful new opera Grounded, which opens the 2024–25 Met season on September 23 and runs through October 19.

Grounded began as a one-woman play by George Brant, which premiered in 2013 and earned widespread acclaim in a 2015 production at the Public Theater. That play starred Anne Hathaway as 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. Now, through a commission from the Met that teamed Brant up with Broadway legend Jeanine Tesori—Tony Award–winning composer of Fun Home and Kimberly Akimbo, who becomes the first woman to have an opera open a Met season—it has grown into a fully fledged opera with an expanded cast and a riveting score, conducted in its Met premiere run by Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Breakout young mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo stars as the pilot, Jess, with tenor Ben Bliss as Eric, a Wyoming rancher turned blackjack dealer who sweeps her off her feet and fathers her child. It all comes together in a high-tech staging by director Michael Mayer, who uses a kaleidoscope of LED screens to illustrate the deadly and disorienting reality of modern warfare—and the splintering of Jess’s shell-shocked mind—with devastating force.

As opening night approached, Tesori and Brant discussed bringing this penetrating story to the operatic stage.

Can you take me back to beginning and tell me how this project started?
Jeanine Tesori: Well, the Met commissioned me to write an opera, and I had been searching for a topic. This was way back in 2014. And then Paul Cremo, the dramaturg at the Met, told me he thought he had found something perfect. He took me to see George’s play Grounded at the Studio Theatre in D.C., and immediately, I knew this was the idea. I absolutely fell in love with it. So Paul called George, and we met for coffee.

George Brant: From my end, it was a bit of a mystery who Paul was matchmaking me with. He saw the original New York production and emailed me the next day saying he thought he heard an opera in it, and asking if I had any interest in that. I said sure, but then there were months of mystery about who the composer was. When I found out it was Jeanine, I couldn’t have been more excited.

Where did the idea for Grounded originally come from, George?
Brant: It started with just a general interest in drones. They were still top secret at the time that I first started looking into them, so there wasn’t much you could find out. We knew they were being used overseas, but we didn’t know quite what we were doing with them. It felt like the attitude toward the public was: “Don’t worry about this. These are great. They don’t put our pilots in harm’s way, and they get the job done.”

How did you get from that general topic to the specific details of your play?
Brant: Well, I wasn’t able to write a play just about a machine, so it stalled until I found stories in Stars and Stripes—the in-house military newspaper—suggesting that drone pilots were experiencing PTSD at the same rates as pilots who were physically in their planes. I had also assumed that the drones were being operated from the countries where they were flying, but I found out that actually many were being controlled from a military base outside Las Vegas, which blew my mind. A lot of this still feels like science fiction to me. And the fact that it was Las Vegas, where everything is unreal and illusory to begin with, was almost too good. It felt like the perfect place for this weapon of war that feels unreal itself.

What made you decide to focus on a woman pilot?
Brant: Part of it might have been the combination of the newness of this weapon and the relative newness of having women in combat. We’ve all seen so many war stories, and for thousands of years, they’ve all been told from a male perspective. So when you see that woman up there in her flight suit, right away there’s a jolt. Plus, the topic of women in the military is an entry point for any woman who has worked in a male-dominated environment. It also helps show that this is the worst work-life balance scenario possible. This woman is going to war for 12 hours a day and then stopping to pick up milk on her way home, where she has to be a functioning part of a family.

Testori: Wow, I never knew why you made it a woman. I never thought to ask that question. But it’s funny because I guess, for me, it wasn’t surprising. When I started out in music, in Nashville and then in New York, I was in a sea of men. I guess a woman surrounded by men is just sort of my expectation.

Did this story bring up a lot of personal memories for you, Jeanine?
Tesori: It gave me an opportunity to imagine a woman about to send bombs down and wondering if she gave her husband the car seat. Because I remember, earlier in my career, when I was about to give the downbeat as a conductor and trying to remember if I packed my kid’s lunch. Motherhood feels life-or-death anyway, and then when you have a job that’s life-or-death, and you’re trying to be there and be here at the same time, it’s impossible. And even before that, the moment that you become pregnant, there’s an instinct of trying to hide it or minimize it. The first time I walked into an orchestra rehearsal of my own work, I was unbelievably pregnant, and I hesitated before I opened the door because I could no longer hide it. I’m embarrassed to say it and slightly ashamed, but that’s how I felt. And then I thought, “Just open the door and walk in.” But I had to overcome my own hypnosis of trying to be a man in this business.

As a composer who’s watching a show with the possibility of turning it into an opera, what are you looking for?
Tesori: The first thing is to determine why it would be musicalized. I’ve started out on some things, and music simply didn’t add to it, didn’t deepen it. Sometimes music actually harms the piece. But with Grounded, I knew there was a way for music to show something. The story and the psyche of the pilot—it’s ripe for music to have a place.

Brant: One pivotal day was when we had actress Kelly McAndrew come in and read chunks of the play from the Met stage. Jeanine really wanted to hear it in the space to get an idea of whether it could truly live here, and we were able to get 15 minutes during a changeover.

Tesori: I remember they were getting ready for Aida because there were animals going across the stage. But yes, the Met is…big. And you just never know what’s going to work until you try it. But she read a scene, and the proscenium seemed to expand while she was reading about the sky, and I knew we could do this. The sky is the only thing, I think, bigger than the Met, and in our piece, the proscenium and the sky would be in a dance.

How did you tap into the experience of a modern U.S. military member?
Tesori: I come from a family of people who have served, but I myself have not. So I will never be able to write from that point of view, but I really tried to honor that life. And your father was a Judge Advocate General, right, George?

Brant: Yes, and a lot of people in my family also served, but like you, I myself have not. But we did everything in our power to do justice to their experience.

What does that mean, exactly?
Tesori: I think Grounded is about unseen trauma. Anyone who finds belonging in a team knows that when you find like-minded people and have a clear, shared goal, the energy is so positive. But in our wars now, what I have heard from service members is that the goal is unclear. So at the heart of this piece is considering what we are asking of these people when the goal is unclear but the expectation when you receive orders is still: Don’t think, just do. What is the psychic effect of being the person who has to push the button?

I understand that one way you explore that question is through the addition of an extra character—the heroine’s alter-ego, named Also Jess.
Tesori: My sisters and I grew up in a challenging household. And I think what happens when you’re a kid in a challenging household is that you split into a part of you that performs and a part of you that stays inside and is protected by that other part. Actually, I still feel split, which helps me in this business when I need to go out and be a badass, or speak publicly to a lot of people. But inside, that other thing remains. So, in our opera, I wondered what it would be like for that other piece of Jess’s psyche to emerge to help her cope, and to be able to sing duets.

How did you find the musical voice for Grounded?
Tesori: I always have been fascinated by drumlines and bagpipes and instruments that scare—that make you imagine what’s happening before you see it. So I wanted to use military cadences and not swerve too much from them, so that people who served would be able to recognize them. I also wanted to capture the tedium of these people behind the scenes, who have to wait and wait and wait and then be ready to be called into action. And I wanted to honor all my years in Nashville with the folk and cowboy music for the scenes with Jess’s husband, Eric.

What changes for you when writing opera rather than musical theater?
Tesori: Well, I write melodies. So when I depart from melody and use dissonance, I hope it’s a very intentional departure to show how I hear that word on the page. I can do that within certain limits on Broadway, but what opera provides is the freedom to show the full spectrum of consonance and dissonance—that, and the firepower of the Met Orchestra, which is like the military. It’s a superpower.

And, of course, it’s different writing for operatic voices.
Tesori: The difference is in the expansion. You can go lower and go higher, literally. And that means that you can cover a greater range of the emotions of the human condition, and in a grander way. To be alive, especially now, is so complicated. So to describe it, I want every color, like when you open a new 64-color box of Crayola crayons, with not one but eight different blues. When I met with Emily D’Angelo, I immediately wanted to write this for her. I went to hear her vocal lessons with this incredible teacher, and the way they discussed music and color—that was it. I wanted to write for all the shades of what she was doing.

Apart from just the glorious voice that she has, what do you think she brings to this role?
Brant: She fully inhabits it. She’s a wonderful actress on top of being a magnificent singer, and I could not feel more lucky that she’s doing this. On the opening night in D.C. [where the production originated in an earlier version], I was so proud of her, and proud to be part of her trajectory and career. She just lifted the piece up and gave us everything we asked of her.

I know you’ve been making a lot of revisions since that initial run at Washington National Opera last year. What has changed for the Met premiere?
Tesori: Well, to begin with, we cut 45 minutes.

Brant: Yeah—especially places where it felt like we had already made our point. We don’t need to repeat ourselves.

Tesori: We also cut a lot of exposition. What the audience needs to know is that it’s a plane, it doesn’t have a pilot, it takes pictures, and it kills people. Cut seven minutes of explanation. Anytime Jess was narrating, it meant that she had her heel in the play and her toe in the opera, and we needed to bring that whole boot over. We also made the relationship with her husband more complex.

Brant: Right. I feel more in love with them as a couple now. I get why they like each other, and I want this to work out for them. 

What do you hope people take away from this piece when they leave the theatre?
Tesori: I would ask them to think more deeply about the people who actually have to pull the levers of war, and our responsibility to them. I hope they are moved, and I hope that they go back into the world and ask questions, like I did after I saw the play.

Brant: I agree with all of that. And I feel like the intent of the play has been elevated to a new level with the magnificent singing and the power of your music. It’s reached its full expression.