I went to see George Brant’s “Grounded” in D.C. back in 2014. I just fell in love with the play, and I fell in love with the actress who played the pilot there. The way that she used the language and took off — it was just this woman in a box with music cues and she evoked this whole world. I’d really never seen anything like it. I’m a huge fan of that form. When it works, there’s something so powerful about one individual doing everything and making it look like it’s without effort. But there were events and choices; she’s a clear protagonist who believes in something and then becomes part of something else. It’s about a fighter pilot, Jess, who feels most free and connected to herself when flying, but an unplanned pregnancy takes her out of the air; when she returns to military service years later, she becomes a drone pilot — able to see her targets up close.
It was working on so many levels. Motherhood, which I am interested in. Being one woman surrounded by men inside an industry, I’m well aware of that feeling and I have been my whole life. And this idea of what happens when your gender becomes quite clear. The day that you go into an orchestra rehearsal and you’re very, very pregnant and you’ve worked so hard to not be very, very pregnant, and yet you’re very, very pregnant. But also this belief system for me that you just do stuff and then you leave and you don’t stick around for whatever good or bad that you’ve caused. She says in the beginning, “I’m not there when the boom happens” because she flies over things. And I think a lot of this life is when you are not there for your impact. That’s how landfills work. You put something in a bag and you put it on the curb. Where does it go? To know is to be held accountable.
The circle of responsibility for war that we don’t want to talk about because it’s who wants to sit inside that and bear witness to someone’s suffering like to protect us. It’s a very complicated nonpartisan thing: the idea of the morality of leadership and the guesswork that was clear in drone warfare. That got me thinking.
I don’t think that “Grounded” would be a musical for a lot of reasons. The way I envision it, I just don’t hear it going from scene work into [song]. It’s just an impulse. I felt that way about “Caroline or, Change” immediately.
I’ve been in the world of opera forever, in my career. I love speech patterns. I think they’re really fascinating. There’s recitative all the way through “Caroline” because I think the way that the rhythm before you get into song form is really interesting to me. I don’t know if everybody loves it. I love it. So it’s part of the way I think and hear something.
Although you can have recitative and sung-through musicals, “Grounded” felt epic. It felt like we needed the spectacle — in that way that Joseph Campbell always describes what’s so hard about cities is how small you feel because in an industrial way and architectural way, it’s humbling you. That’s why the cathedrals work so well. You’re in awe of the divine. And here, in New York, we’re in awe of industry. These are cities that are saying you are a very small, small part. When you go to Boston, you feel differently. So I thought the proscenium at the Met would be an unbelievable way to tell us of how she feels about the sky, because it’s so tall.
The source material is one woman in a very small theater and evoking that by telling us. We would have to show it.
And yet, I don’t want the genre “opera” to exclude any audience from coming to see this — or any work. I think anyone who enjoys theater — or just gathering in a communal space to hear and witness story — needs to think of this without labels.
