‘This House’: An Intimate, Intergenerational Opera Is Also a Family Affair
Ricky Ian Gordon and Lynn Nottage tell the story of three generations in a Harlem home. Enter a second Nottage generation, her daughter, on the creative team.During the Covid pandemic, lockdowns made our homes seem like leading characters in our daily lives; those familiar confines became as much a presence in our experiences as any living creature. For the creative trio of the composer Ricky Ian Gordon and the librettists Lynn Nottage and Ruby Aiyo Gerber, that experience fueled “This House,” a new opera having its world premiere on Saturday at the Opera Theater of St. Louis. (It runs through June 29.)This project reunites Nottage and Gordon, who previously worked together on the chamber opera “Intimate Apparel,” a Metropolitan Opera commission that ran at the Lincoln Center Theater in 2022 after a pandemic delay.Gordon and Nottage, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, found they had a deep rapport. “The hardest thing when you’re collaborating is when you see different things,” Nottage said in a Zoom interview with the three creators. “I’ve been in collaborations where I see red, and then I realize, ‘Oh, my collaborator sees blue.’ So then how do we get to purple? That was not the case with Ricky. We had a shared vocabulary.”That common language expanded with the addition of a second librettist: Gerber, Nottage’s daughter, a writer and multimedia artist. The mother-daughter pairing seems particularly suited to “This House,” which explores the bonds and struggles of three generations of the Walker family in Harlem.(This House) ((Brad Bickhardt (Glenn) and Briana Hunter (Zoe) )))Eric WoolseyJustin Austin, left, and Kearstin Piper Brown in Gordon and Nottage’s “Intimate Apparel” at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More