If you doubt that opera today is in a crisis, just crack recent books by a pair of MacArthur Fellows the embattled Metropolitan is investing in big-time. The composer Matthew Aucoin, a mandarin of intimidating intellect, calls his celebratory volume The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera; note that qualifier “impossible.” And then there’s the brainiac, populist, and social-justice warrior Yuval Sharon, director of the Met’s next Tristan und Isolde and “Ring” cycle, with A New Philosophy of Opera, cheerily spelling out why nothing will work. Of late, the Met’s strategy has been to gerrymander the audience by means of new and newish repertory targeted to underserved demographics. The latest roll of the dice brings us Grounded, based on a one-woman play by George Brant that was a smash in New York for Anne Hathaway and has been seen (sometimes with a second actor) in over 100 productions around the world. The mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo, who commands the opera stage the way Megan Rapinoe ruled the soccer pitch, stars as Jess, a top-gun American fighter pilot, whose wheelhouse is the cockpit of an F-16 over Iraq. But an unplanned pregnancy lands her at a video console in Las Vegas, from which she zaps enemies halfway around the world by killer drone. Unlike the play, the opera has a full supporting cast, plus chorus. It’s scored by Jeanine Tesori, best known for a suite of musicals of occasionally operatic tendencies (Thoroughly Modern Millie; Caroline, or Change; Shrek The Musical; Fun Home; Kimberly Akimbo). The premiere of the Tesori Grounded in Washington last October impressed the cool-headed Zachary Woolf of The New York Times as “surprisingly unexplosive.” Heigh ho! We hear that there have been significant revisions since those out-of-town tryouts. But however the show goes down in the Big Apple, a personal triumph for D’Angelo is a foregone conclusion. —Matthew Gurewitsch