The arts world was scandalized this past spring when the Washington National Opera announced that the sponsor of the production that would be opening its 2023-24 season was the General Dynamics Corporation, one of the world’s leading arms manufacturers. Things got all the hotter for the WNO when the schedule for the season showed it would feature the world premiere of Jeanine Tesori’s Grounded, an opera based on a play about a fighter pilot-turned-drone operator. The people who appropriate taxpayer money to buy Reaper drones had apparently given this corporation so much business that some of its leftover profits had been donated to the local Washington opera company to entertain them with a propaganda piece about the benefits of Reaper drones. Or so it was assumed.
The bad optics sent the Metropolitan Opera, which had commissioned the work and farmed it out to the WNO for an out-of-town tryout before a date opening the New York institution’s 2024-25 season next September, into a panic. The connection with General Dynamics led at least one left-wing think tank and the wags at New York magazine, which gave the opera a “despicable” tag in its weekly “Approval Matrix” of fashionable liberal opinion, to believe that it must be a pro-war (or at least pro-killing machine) opera. That led Met General Manager Peter Gelb and his D.C. counterpart to go into desperate spin mode, assuring their subscribers and potential critics that General Dynamics had no input into what would be staged. As the New York Times reported, they were at pains to point out that the only reason that the company gave $500,000 to the WNO was because its chairman had been an opera buff since childhood. The drone company funding a drone opera had been a coincidence.
THE COLLECTIBLE WATCH MARKET KNOWS THE FALLING PRICE OF EVERYTHING AND THE VALUE OF NOTHING
And of course it had the notion that any arts company would produce anything other than what Gelb accurately described as an “anti-war” piece was always absurd. But now that Grounded has finally received its first public performance, those worried about a potential dark conspiracy on the part of General Dynamics to promote its wares and the conflicts in which they are employed via sympathetic opera productions should rest easy. The opera, based on George Brant’s play of the same name about America’s drone campaign against Islamist terrorists in Afghanistan, is resolutely anti-drone.
It may not be negative enough about the Air Force or the romance of flying jets as perhaps contemporary leftist orthodoxy would demand. But the focus on the deadly impact of remote technology and its humanization of the drone’s prey should be enough to get both the Washington and New York opera companies off the hook for doing anything other than a smear job about the military in an era when it is largely employed in the fight against terrorism. This is not an operatic Top Gun: Maverick.
If anything, the critical and moral objections to Grounded are that it is too anti-drone and therefore refuses to examine the basic truth of why there are people such as General Dynamics’s engineers and the U.S. military’s drone operators dedicating themselves to killing terrorists. That truth, of course, is that the world is made massively better and more just by this work. And the timing of its premiere, coming in the middle of Israel’s war on Hamas, a terrorist group as guilty of barbaric outrages as the Islamic State, the Taliban, or al Qaeda, raises troubling questions about a piece that essentially demands that the audience identify with the plight of a murderer who is being hunted by the opera’s heroine while ignoring the reason why he’s on the Air Force’s kill list.
The original version of Grounded was a one-woman monologue that opened off-Broadway in 2015 with movie star Anne Hathaway cast in its only role. The conceit of the play is its depiction of the disintegration of a hot-shot female Air Force F-16 pilot once she is reduced to the tedium and tension of watching a computer screen during 12-hour shifts while also attempting to live a normal life outside of work with a husband and child. The opera expands this story by giving the play’s anonymous protagonist a name and a cast of characters in her home and work life, along with choruses of pilots and drone targets, thus giving Tesori and Brant, who serves as her librettist, a wider palette to tell the story.
The result is a mixed bag both musically and dramatically. Tesori has some classical credits, including the politically fashionable opera Blue about police violence that was heard at the WNO. But she is best known for Broadway musicals such as the highly regarded Kimberly Akimbo and Caroline, or Change, as well as the risible Shrek the Musical. And it is in production numbers such as those that depict the bravado of her fellow pilots, a day shopping at the mall or a love duet between the pilot and the rancher who impregnates her — that might have been dropped into a musical as easily as an opera — that seem to bring out the best in the composer.
There are moments in which Tesori’s skill in writing for a classically trained voice shines, such as her aria “Blue” in which mezzo Emily D’Angelo, a budding star whose career should get a boost from this opera, is shown to great advantage as Jess the grounded pilot muses on her love for flying. But for the most part, the composer’s attempt to show the psychological tension of drone warfare and the way it wears down the protagonist falls flat.
The only character with any real depth is the grounded pilot. And though the rest of the largely admirable cast does its best with the limited opportunities it is given, the result is a flabby concoction that drags for most of the opera’s two acts. Nor is the evening enlivened by the set, dominated by LED screens that show a drone’s-eye view of its mission. Like the pilot, the audience must strain to make sense of the images of a car driving along a barren landscape as she waits for the target to emerge and allow a missile to go “boom.” If piloting the deadly Reaper is a boring and soul-crushing job for the person assigned to that task, the same might be said for having to sit through 150 minutes of music and blurry projected images about the subject.
Still, it is the inevitable denouement in which the pilot, now breaking down to the point where she is suffering disassociation from her own identity (shown by having another singer portray her in some scenes) and betrays her brief as terrorist-killer that demonstrates the opera’s true purpose. All we know about her target is that his code name is “Cobra” and that he is “No. 2” on the hit list. But since he is tracked to the home of “one of his wives,” there is little doubt that he is a leader of one of the Islamist terrorist groups that the United States has been fighting with mixed success during the more than two decades since the 9/11 attacks.
With what is left of her now broken-down fighter ace mentality, Jess is determined to be the pilot to kill the target. But as her psychosis gradually takes over, she becomes equally convinced that the child that she imagines is running toward the terrorist once he emerges from his vehicle is her own daughter. Rather than follow orders and kill the terrorist, she crashes the drone and is court-martialed.
The moral of the story is that maybe Cobra is just like us, a guy with a family and a difficult job that takes him away from his loved ones too much of the time. That ending may not be sufficiently anti-war for this opera to be fully embraced by fashionable opinion in the way that some of the Met’s other recent contemporary productions have been. But it speaks volumes about the dissociation of artists from the reality of the struggle against groups such as ISIS, the Taliban, and Hamas.
If we are to have operas about the wars these groups provoke, to focus only on the combat’s psychological impact on the Americans who fight them with modern technology is to engage in a distortion of events. It is to look at 21st-century war through the wrong end of the lens, which produces the sort of “anti-war” art that is, in effect, in favor of more violence. Grounded ultimately does its subject a greater disservice than if it were merely, as some feared it would be, a patriotic paean to the hardware produced by General Dynamics.
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Jonathan Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS.org and a columnist for Newsweek. Follow him at: @jonathans_tobin.
Washington National Opera’s Grounded makes the case for not killing terrorists
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03.11.2023
The arts world was scandalized this past spring when the Washington National Opera announced that the sponsor of the production that would be opening its 2023-24 season was the General Dynamics Corporation, one of the world’s leading arms manufacturers. Things got all the hotter for the WNO when the schedule for the season showed it would feature the world premiere of Jeanine Tesori’s Grounded, an opera based on a play about a fighter pilot-turned-drone operator. The people who appropriate taxpayer money to buy Reaper drones had apparently given this corporation so much business that some of its leftover profits had been donated to the local Washington opera company to entertain them with a propaganda piece about the benefits of Reaper drones. Or so it was assumed.
The bad optics sent the Metropolitan Opera, which had commissioned the work and farmed it out to the WNO for an out-of-town tryout before a date opening the New York institution’s 2024-25 season next September, into a panic. The connection with General Dynamics led at least one left-wing think tank and the wags at New York magazine, which gave the opera a “despicable” tag in its weekly “Approval Matrix” of fashionable liberal opinion, to believe that it must be a pro-war (or at least pro-killing machine) opera. That led Met General Manager Peter Gelb and his D.C. counterpart to go into desperate spin mode, assuring their subscribers and potential critics that General Dynamics had no input into what would be staged. As the New York Times reported, they were at pains to point out that the only reason that the company gave $500,000 to the WNO was because its chairman had been an opera buff since childhood. The drone company funding a drone opera had been a coincidence.
THE COLLECTIBLE WATCH MARKET KNOWS THE FALLING PRICE OF EVERYTHING AND THE VALUE OF NOTHING
And of course it had the notion that any arts company would produce anything other than what Gelb accurately described as an “anti-war” piece was always absurd. But now that Grounded has finally received its first public performance,........
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