The Metropolitan Opera stage is no stranger to warfare, but what happens when it’s not a guy wielding a spear, but a mezzo-soprano wearing a flight suit? Next week, 29-year-old Canadian Emily D’Angelo will appear at the Met in Grounded , the story of Jess, a fighter pilot in the Iraq war who, following an unexpected pregnancy, re-enters the Air Force as a drone operator. After purposefully missing a target and crashing her “Reaper” drone, however, she is court-martialed and imprisoned. Based on George Brant’s 2013 play of the same name , Grounded is a harrowing dive into the horrors of drone warfare—and its very human effects on the people pulling the trigger.
Jeanine Tesori, the Tony-winning composer behind Fun Home and Kimberly Akimbo , wrote the score with D’Angelo in mind after an introduction from Peter Gelb, the Met Opera’s general manager. After a run at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, last year, the Michael Mayer-directed production is getting its final polish this week ahead of its Lincoln Center debut. As evidenced by a recent rehearsal led by conductor Yannick Nezet-Seguin, Tesori’s Copland-esque music captures both the wide-open spaces of the American West (Las Vegas and Wyoming are two key settings) and the horizonless view from a cockpit.
Giant LED screens do a lot of visual storytelling—whether with racing clouds or the chilling video-game graphics of the drone’s kill sequences. In the middle of it all is D’Angelo, who, despite the.