Now we look forward to a new season exploring many themes and ideas, each offering something very new. Yes, of course, opera lets us explore the many facets of love and the heart, but each offering asks other questions as well. While the arts can transport us to other realms, times, and places, they allow us time to reflect on urgent questions of our contemporary world. They can also foster dialogue and serve as a public sphere, enabling audiences to encounter the complexities of the world. Any piece one presents inevitably evokes historical parallels to what is happening today. We welcome those conversations, and we believe that the theater is the perfect place to have them, so we invite you to let us hear from you over the season.

Our repertory offers a view of our broad vision for WNO. We continue to celebrate the glorious history of the art form with dazzling productions of favorite titles from our international canon, this year featuring works by Puccini, Gounod, and Offenbach. At the same time, we are actively participating in building for the future of opera in America, investing in contemporary American stories and creators. All our offerings are new, in one way or another. Along with our mainstage offerings, we are participating this fall in the D.C.-wide Shakespeare Everywhere Festival; bringing back the family-friendly holiday opera; and continuing with the Cafritz Young Artist recitals, the Marian Anderson Vocal Award Recital, and Opera in the Outfield®.

We welcome you to the opening of the season with a world premiere, Grounded, by Jeanine Tesori and George Brant, commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera and co-produced with Washington National Opera. It is the story of an Air Force pilot who is grounded after becoming pregnant, but then sent to fight with drones. The visionary production marks our first use of LED screens, which help transport audiences into the flying sequences. We are thrilled to invest in the work of this important American composer again, following our 2013 premiere of Tesori’s The Lion, the Unicorn, and Me and our recording and performances of her opera Blue last season.

In repertory with this is Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet, led by our friend and colleague, Simon Godwin, artistic director of the Shakespeare Theatre Company of D.C. This production marks Simon’s operatic debut, and we are excited to see how he unfolds this classic tale with a stellar cast—again, with many debuts, which makes it an exciting opportunity for us. And don’t miss over a dozen other organizations in Washington, D.C. who will be sharing our many stages around the unifying idea of the Shakespeare Everywhere Festival, running through December.

The winter holidays offer an opportunity for families to begin—or continue—a tradition of theater going. We’re thrilled to bring back our holiday opera, with performances of The Lion, the Unicorn, and Me. This gives us a chance to welcome a whole new crop of audiences of all ages to WNO.

Meanwhile, six composers and librettists have been selected for the American Opera Initiative program coming up in January. They were chosen from nearly 150 talented individuals who applied to create AOI commissions. Paired as three teams of composers and librettists they will receive expert guidance from mentors in development of their one-act operas. As in years past, these world premieres will feature members of the Cafritz Young Artists in role written specifically to showcase their voices.

In the spring, we will present Songbird, a new take on Offenbach’s charming operetta La Périchole. This adaptation by Kelley Rourke, James Lowe, and Eric Sean Fogel moves the action to Prohibition-era New Orleans, with a musical arrangement based on jazz combos of the time. The production will feature the brilliant mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard in the title role.

And lastly, we are taking on the Everest of the Italian repertoire, Turandot. We have long found Turandot to be one of Puccini’s most fascinating operas, in part because of its complications. Puccini died before he was able to complete it. The story concerns a princess who refuses to marry until a suitor can answer three riddles. Turandot is proud and cruel, but she is also (and this is often overlooked) the source of her country’s laws. What an incredible thing for a woman!

Our new production of Turandot will present a newly commissioned conclusion by playwright and screenwriter Susan Soon He Stanton and composer Christopher Tin. It is a portrait of a strong woman who overcomes a traumatic past, an experience that leads to the fall of tyranny and the rise of democracy.

We look forward to gathering our family over and over this season, and for many seasons to come. For now, we close with our wishes for a wonderful year, and we hope to see you often. And please let us hear from you!

Jess can either keep the baby or keep flying. Despite appeals from her Commander that she’s invaluable to the squadron, she accepts the status DNIF, or “Duty Not Including Flying,” and she and Eric soon welcome their daughter, Sam. Eight years pass. Longing for the sky, Jess returns to her Commander, who, instead of sending her back to her beloved F-16, assigns her to pilot drones remotely, from a trailer near Las Vegas. Jess protests. But the Commander counters that since operators work 12-hour shifts and return to their families each night, Jess will get “war with all the benefits of home.” She, Eric, and Sam move to Vegas.

In the trailer, Jess adjusts to her new team: the Sensor, a teenage, former gaming champion who controls the drone’s cameras; the Kill Chain, a chain of command that, via headset, assigns missions and approves strikes; and two stoic Observers. Initial tedium gives way to unexpected adrenaline rushes as Jess launches strikes. Meanwhile, Eric gets a job as a blackjack dealer. Jess begins encountering an eerie Drone Squadron and a second, dissociated version of herself, Also Jess.

But it’s not that easy. On the one-year anniversary of Jess’ arrival in the trailer, the Commander assigns her a high-profile mission: track the car suspected to hold target number two on the kill list, and once he steps out and is identified, strike. Jess’ relentless pursuit of her target and the intense strain of the mission blur the already faint lines between war and her personal life; she believes a sleeping Sam to be dead, refuses to take off her flight suit after work, and mentally splits into herself and Also Jess during sex with Eric. Finally, Jess tracks her target to his home—but he doesn’t leave his car. As he drives off, a girl runs from the house, and the target springs from his car, waving her away: a positive identification. The Kill Chain orders the strike. But Jess, seeing Sam in the girl’s place, does everything in her power to save her child.

It’s a divided world for drone operators: launching deadly strikes and then leading domestic lives. Grounded, a new opera from playwright-turned-librettist George Brant and composer Jeanine Tesori, adapts Brant’s award-winning play of the same name into a raw, unrestrained account of a pilot under disparate pressures.

“I was first drawn to the drone subject in 2011, curious about how they operated, their increasing use and the moral questions they raised,” says Brant. “I wasn’t intending to write about the pilots, but I ended up intrigued by their story, particularly by the mental challenge presented by this new method of waging war.”

As the use of drones has expanded in the wake of 9/11—Dr. Asaro’s research cites an increase from 70 to 7,000 in the U.S. military between 2001 and 2012—so too have the demands on their operators. Despite their distance from combat, drone pilots display similar rates of post-traumatic stress disorder as their flying colleagues (according to research from the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center). It’s a subject that clearly resonates: Grounded’s accolades include the National New Play Network’s 2012 Smith Prize for Political Theater, a Scotsman Fringe First Award at the 2013 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and a 2016 Lucille Lortel Award for a production from director Julie Taymor, starring Anne Hathaway. The play now boasts 184 productions, in 25 countries, in 17 languages.

To that momentum, add Tesori: a two-time Tony Award®–winner whose opera Blue, with librettist-director Tazewell Thompson, received not only its D.C. premiere at WNO, but also the 2020 Best New Opera Award from the Music Critics Association of North America. This December, WNO revives her hit holiday opera The Lion, the Unicorn, and Me, commissioned by the company and premiered in 2013.

Tesori and Brant joined forces via Paul Cremo, the Metropolitan Opera’s dramaturg and director of its Opera Commissioning Program. When Cremo attended a 2014 performance of Grounded in New York City, Tesori had been commissioned by the Met and Lincoln Center Theater’s joint New Works Program to develop a new opera through a workshop process. The subject, however, remained open. Cremo recognized in the play’s central character, The Pilot, many of the qualities he had come to appreciate about Tesori.

“She’s strong, she’s smart, she excels in a primarily male world, and her challenge is the high standards she sets for herself,” he says. “As a composer, she’s dramaturgically incisive, dramatically sharp. She asks probing, inspiring questions. I thought this character and this play were a perfect fit.”

The New York run ended; Cremo brought Tesori to D.C., where Studio Theatre was presenting a production of Grounded from London’s Gate Theatre. It was a match. Tesori and Brant began transforming the one-woman play into a multi-character opera, and as the Met got a better sense of the work, they offered the duo a full commission and a production date. In 2018, the project was officially announced: Tesori and Missy Mazzoli made headlines as the first female composers to receive commissions from the Met. A journey of nearly 10 years has brought the opera Grounded to its world premiere co-production between the Met and Washington National Opera.

—Charlotte Maskelony is dramaturg for the Washington National Opera.

“I always saw the Pilot as a female,” says Brant. “We’ve all heard the male version of war, but so few versions of female warriors.” Brant also felt focusing on a woman at war would be timely. “Here was this brand-new technology, a new way of waging battle, when the introduction of women into the military was fairly new as well. I thought the collision of those two elements could create an interesting dramatic situation.”

In his research, Brant discovered that the technology sold as “precise, low-risk, and safe for pilots,” was not exactly as advertised—drone duty, he learned, takes a heavy emotional toll on its operators. The fact that drone pilots did not live on base, but went home after each 12-hour shift, created an additional layer of tension, between high-stakes kill scenarios by day and mundane domestic routine by night, further intensifying the dramatic stakes for the Pilot character. When Brant learned that a key U.S. drone base was located in Las Vegas, this surreal collision of visual worlds suggested further contrasts and disconnections in the drone pilot’s life, and as a result, more theatrical possibilities.

Brant decided to write the play as a one-woman piece. “It allowed me to get into the head of the Pilot,” he explains. “And it enabled me to make jumps in time and location more easily.” It also created an intimacy with the audience, as the Pilot, a guarded, duty-bound military professional, could open up in a way she couldn’t if speaking with other characters.

Grounded was a meteoric theatrical success, with productions in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Edinburgh, London (The Guardian hailed it as a “searing piece of writing”), two productions in New York (The New York Times called it “gripping”), and other international cities. Composer Jeanine Tesori, looking for an operatic subject, saw the play in D.C. and was struck by the fascinating main character and the drama’s compelling central issues. When Brant was invited to adapt his play into an opera, he was gobsmacked. “It was a lot to wrap my head around,” admits the first-time librettist. “At first I thought, ‘She means a solo or chamber piece.’ Then it became clear she was thinking bigger.”

That meant expanding the one-woman play into a multi-character opera; the Metropolitan Opera had commissioned Tesori to write a new work, initially developed through a workshop program co-sponsored by the Met and Lincoln Center Theater. “In the opera, the people that the Pilot mentions in the play would be fully developed characters,” says Brant. “But I needed to start thinking beyond that.” In order to take some of the vocal load off of the Pilot, now named Jess, Brant and Tesori sought ways to have others sing her innermost thoughts. For this they employed the chorus, as well as an alter ego, “Also Jess,” to express Jess’ growing sense of dissociation as a result of trauma (an idea of Tesori’s inspired by a line in the play, “I am above myself”). “Jeanine and I discussed how to do all this while still keeping the focus on Jess,” Brant explains.

While the basis for Jess’ arias could be found in the play’s monologues, finding a voice for the character of Eric, her husband, was harder. In the play, we only hear Eric from Jess’ point of view, but for the opera, he needed to have his own perspective, his own style. Brant hit upon the idea of changing Eric’s backstory, from someone who runs his family’s hardware store in the play to a rancher in the opera, playing on myths of the American West. “Jeanine and I wanted Eric to be a rock star in his own right, so they could be equals in their own worlds, to meet on a similar mythic plain.”

Brant relished the creative collaboration with Tesori. “Working with someone of Jeanine’s caliber is intimidating,” he admits. “But her openness and encouragement to write freely and edit later inspired me to let the words pour out and worry about cutting afterwards.” He was impressed with the amount of research Tesori did—digging not only into the technology of drones and the psychology of pilots and the PTSD they experience, but other aspects as well, from the mall that opens Act II to the surveillance culture that is a backdrop of the story. Brant found his conversations with Tesori invaluable in helping him understand how a libretto works in tandem with the music—a blending of forces which, he says, only she could ultimately conceive of as she composed the music.

Brant had heard computer mockups of the score during the development process, with synthesized instruments standing in for the voices, but it wasn’t until a workshop production of the opera at WNO in January of 2022 that he first heard Grounded sung by human voices. “To hear words sung that I’d only heard spoken for ten years, to hear the newer material, created for the opera, and to feel how the music added exponentially to the storytelling was exhilarating. To hear Jeanine’s response to the central tension of the piece—the tension between Jess’ work and home life—felt like the full flowering of the ideas in the play,” he explains. “Like this is what’s possible with this story, the breadth and depth of it. . . the way her music opens up everything, the way it moves you beyond just the words or the music alone. It’s like the piece in its operatic form has reached its zenith.”

—Paul Cremo is the Dramaturg/Director of Opera Commissioning Program at The Metropolitan Opera.

At a glance, the set composed of two intersecting geometric planes seems simple enough. It is anything but. More than 300 LED tile panels are interconnected on the floor (or ground) and ceiling (or sky) surfaces to create scenic backdrops, projecting images ranging from a cinematic squadron of F-16 fighter jets to the claustrophobic confines of the trailer from where grounded pilot Jess operates drones. The intersecting planes can also be shifted and angled during the course of the action.

A set made up entirely of LED panels emphasizes how the world of Grounded is inundated with digital images, says Set Designer Mimi Lien. “Upon encountering this piece, I felt that it was ultimately a story about the relationship between humans and technology, and our increasing reliance on digital imagery—for better or for worse. As a result, I thought that the set should feel and move like a machine—something that envelops the human performers.”

While an LED-tiled set may seem somewhat familiar from pop concert stages or events that rely on a bombardment of color, images, and sound, Grounded represents a new direction for opera productions. Co-Projection Designers Jason H. Thompson and Kaitlyn Pietras see a common thread in the use of advanced video technology to tell a story about technological advancements in military operations. “The projection design helps with scenic context in some scenes, but this opera is about reconciling the shift in technology in warfare and how that affects the way these drone pilots see and interact with the ‘enemy.’ They are removed from their targets not only through distance but layers of digital information,” says Pietras. The team built animations that are mapped to the LED projections for a sense of real-time video and created some content by moving virtual cameras through 3D environments.

Thompson and Pietras felt that the imagery should seem a natural part of the story, alive and responsive to the music, and reflective of Jess’ psychological state throughout her journey. Operating from her remote location, Jess is physically removed from the action, but remains enveloped in digital imagery. “We hope to show how the artificial realities of Jess’ job as a drone pilot start to bleed into her actual reality at home as her own psyche starts to buckle and break down under the stress of this new lens of warfare,” says Pietras.

Grounded’s innovations may make more traditional opera sets seem old-fashioned in comparison, although Lien finds inherent challenges in working with the confines of any story. “I typically think a lot about the right material for the show, as I start conceiving the design—does this space feel like it should be made out of glass? Concrete? Or fur? Or a thousand rubber ducks? This piece just felt like the materiality of it should be technology itself—and that manifested itself in the LED panels. It felt like the source of the images should be on stage, not just a screen that is ‘receiving’ projected images.”

To learn more about drones and the teams behind them, find these recommended resources online or at your local library:

Drone (by Adam Rothstein). This short read offers a comprehensive introduction to drones, including their development, software, hardware and their relationship to their human creators. Life in the Age of Drone Warfare (edited by Lisa Parks and Caren Kaplan). Collected essays examine drones through a historical, geopolitical, and cultural lens. Standouts include Peter Asaro’s “The Labor of Surveillance and Bureaucratized Killing” and Brandon Bryant’s “Letter from a Sensor Operator.”

Drones and Targeted Killing (by Marjorie Cohn). Collected essays discuss the legality, morality, and political implications of drone strikes. If you only have time for two, read Thomas Reifer’s “A Global Assassination Program” and John Quigley’s “Drone Strike Blowback.”

“Drone Pilots Are Found to Get Stress Disorders Much as Those in Combat Do” (by James Dao, The New York Times, February 22, 2013). This article, available online, reports on research into mental health among drone pilots.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind (by Pitch Interactive). Using data from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, this narrative visualization documents every known drone strike carried out by the U.S. and coalition forces in Pakistan from 2004 to 2015. Find it at drones.pitchinteractive.com

In 2022, the United States Air Force announced that pregnant pilots could now fly all combat aircraft. An earlier ruling, after the play’s premiere, had stated that aircrew members who were pregnant could continue to fly, but not in aircraft with ejection seats. That regulation on ejection seats now applies only to the third trimester, and for pregnancies without complications. Military personnel can request to continue flying during pregnancy, with medical evaluation and with the joint consent of the pilot, their obstetrician, flight doctor, and unit commander.

Regulations regarding drone strikes have been under continual reassessment as they have become a more regular part of military and counterterrorism operations. By 2013, when the play Grounded first debuted, the killing of innocent civilians in U.S. drone strikes had already resulted in regulations limiting them to “direct action” operations outside of conventional war zones where forces are on the ground, with a vetting system outlined for selection of targets. In October 2022, President Joseph R. Biden signed a Presidential Policy Memorandum with regulations stating that any drone strike outside a conventional war zone must have “near certainty” that civilians will not be injured, and that for such strikes, operators must deem “infeasible” the possibility of capturing the targeted individuals. Advance approval by the President is generally needed for such actions. The regulations focus on individual targets, banning “signature strikes” that have targeted groups whose individual members were not identified.

One major event was a performance and panel discussion at the Military Women’s Memorial on October 23. The distinguished panelists were Lt. Col. Tammy Barlette, a former U.S. Air Force fighter pilot who has logged more than 3,000 total flight hours and over 1,500 hours of combat support time in both Iraq and Afghanistan; Maj. Scott Swanson, a retired U.S. Air Force pilot and pioneer in unmanned systems including the Predator Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAS); Ret. Col. Elspeth Cameron “Cam” Ritchie, MD, MPH, current chief of psychiatry at Medstar Washington Hospital Center and a forensic psychiatrist with expertise in military and veteran’s issues; and George Brant, Grounded librettist. The panel was moderated by WNO Artistic Director Francesca Zambello. Other community engagements include:

• Workshop with Armed Services Arts Partnership on October 8 that gave free art and theater instruction to veterans and offered a free workshop led by Grounded librettist George Brant.
• Grounded open rehearsal for students on October 24.
• “Courage in Service,” in partnership with The Elizabeth Dole Foundation & Hidden Heroes invited 100 members of the military community to a performance of Grounded on November 1, with a reception during intermission.
• Mental wellness resources provided by Stop Soldier Suicide at each Grounded
• Pre-performance talks before every performance.
• Post-performance artists Q&A sessions on November 1, 5, and 13.