Lynn Nottage, the first and only two-time female winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, joins forces with her daughter and fellow writer Ruby Aiyo Gerber as librettist for This House, a new opera with music by the prolific Ricky Ian Gordon. In This House, location, location, location plays as critical a role as the Walker family generations who have inhabited the Harlem brownstone since the 1920s. The ball starts rolling when a daughter comes home after many years away and wants to renovate. But her brother and their mother, who have never left, can’t let go of the past. “The house is their whole world, and every room is full of ghostly voices and painful memories,” a précis tells us. “As hidden truths about the family’s legacy come to light, Zoe begins to realize that the secrets harbored within these walls are deeper and more profound than she ever dared to imagine.” It’s reassuring to know that this is not Nottage and Gordon’s first night at the opera. They collaborated previously on Intimate Apparel, which harks back to the early–20th century and tells of a seamstress who stitches deluxe unmentionables for society ladies and ladies of the night. The show, with two-piano accompaniment, won rave reviews at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, where it ran for three weeks in 2020 before it was shutdown by the pandemic (it resumed its run in 2022). Nottage adapted the libretto from her own hit play, leaving about half on the cutting-room floor, including the lion’s share of what might pass for “poetry.” That shows spider sense for the realities of the librettist’s job, which is to create a space—a house, if you like—for music and people to dwell in. —Matthew Gurewitsch