New opera “This House” includes reflections of 20th century African American life in New York, sweeping across the decades to depict intellectual salons and rent parties of the Harlem Renaissance, a young poet’s experience of late-1960s Black nationalism movements and the realities of living with HIV in the ‘80s and ‘90s.
“This House” is also a ghost story. A woman in the present day who’s thinking about moving back into her childhood home interacts with departed family members still haunting the Harlem brownstone that bore witness to a century of changes.
The concept works as a dramatic device and as a metaphor.
“To be Black in America is to be, in a sense, living in a ghost story — in the shadow of slavery, in the shadow of the civil rights movement. All of these historical events that came before us are still very much present,” said co-librettist Ruby Aiyo Gerber.
The world premiere of “This House” at Opera Theatre of St. Louis runs through June 29.
“I have a deep belief that Black history in this country can't be told linearly,” Gerber added, “because we are constantly living in this moment that's marked by all of past that came with us.”
This opera about intergenerational exchange is the fruit of an intergenerational creative team: Gerber wrote the libretto with her mother, playwright Lynn Nottage. Composer Ricky Ian Gordon wrote the music. James Robinson is the stage director, and Daniela Candillari conducts members of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.
Nottage, who won the Pulitzer Prize for drama for her plays “Ruined” and “Sweat” and remains the only woman to have won the honor twice, moved back into her family’s Brooklyn brownstone as an adult. There she lived again with her father while raising a son and daughter. The opera is rooted in her family’s experience.
“We're hyperaware of the beautiful intergenerational dialogue that you can have, that so many people these days don't get. There isn’t as much of an emphasis on intergenerational living,” Nottage said.
“Our House” began as a play that Gerber, a writer and poet, wrote as an undergrad at Brown University. When she shared it with Nottage for feedback, the playwright saw the basis for a potential libretto.
And so the women’s relationship entered a new phase.
“This process really allowed Ruby and I to dialogue in a different way than we have in the past. We have been mother and daughter; now we are collaborators. That comes with a different kind of mutual respect. It also allowed us to have conversations about family, about each other, and just the way the memory works,” Nottage said.
“That’s what this opera is: a century of conversations in two hours,” she added.
Nottage previously collaborated with Gordon on the operatic adaptation of her play “Intimate Apparel.” Gordon prides himself on an encyclopedic knowledge of European opera and American popular music.
“I've been going to the opera since I was 8. Part of the reason I write opera is because I've been obsessed with it since I was a little boy,” Gordon said. “This one feels fresh to me. I know a lot of opera, and I haven't seen [anything like] this opera.”
“This House” makes musical references to various idioms across its story’s historical sweep.
“There's a lot there,” Gordon said, “including American symphonic styles, American dance styles, ragtime, bebop. It’s all there.”
Nottage is known in part for her facility in informing her work with historical research. For “Sweat,” a story about Pennsylvania factory workers, Nottage spent two years interviewing people about their experiences in Reading. She traveled to East Africa to interview Congolese women fleeing war for “Ruined.”
The idea for “Intimate Apparel,” which documents turn-of-the-20th century life for a New York seamstress, was sparked by a passport photo of Nottage’s great-grandmother that she found in the Harlem home of her mother’s side of the family. Nottage followed up the find with weeks of visits to New York libraries.
“This House” is also grounded in the historical record.
“A lot of the research we did was around the poetry and art and music of the different periods the family was living in,” Gerber said. “So we looked at the Harlem Renaissance. We looked at Black poets like Essex Hemphill, who wrote wonderful poetry about being a Black, gay man and an artist.”
“Reading and looking at art and listening to music was a form of research that became its own archive for us,” Gerber added.
Nottage and Gerber each credited Gordon for emphasizing how an opera’s music and text work together to convey characters’ emotions and motivations.
In “This House,” the building itself is a sort of character. Singers and musicians are tasked with conveying the sound of its breath.
“I want people to be thinking about the spaces that they occupy and the histories of those spaces, and how many people have passed through it, and who built it, and why it was built,” Nottage said.
“All of those complicated questions bring us closer together,” she said, “and we realize that the house we live in is not just our house, but it’s a collective space with many histories.”
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