Ruby Aiyo Gerber: For so long, I rebelled against wanting to be a writer, fearing that admiring any part of you was to be forever in your shadow. I had a lot of fear when starting the collaboration [on the opera “This House,” with the composer Ricky Ian Gordon, which premieres next year at the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis; based on a play that Gerber wrote, it’s about a brownstone in Harlem and its inhabitants over a century] that I wouldn’t be able to be my own writer, that I’d be like a version of you, that my words would turn into yours.
Lynn Nottage: In both librettos we’re collaborating on right now [for “This House” and another forthcoming opera tentatively called “The Highlands,” with the composer Carlos Simon], we’re dealing with intergenerational trauma, intergenerational love. A daughter grappling with her legacy, a daughter grappling with her relationship to her mother, a daughter trying to decide if she wants to take this gift that her mother has offered her. Embedded in the themes we’re exploring is our relationship.
R.A.G.: There’s always a little part of me that wonders how much of my career was already decided. “How much am I forging my own path? Did you plant these seeds early on? Could I have been anything else?” You weren’t raised by two artists [Gerber’s father is the filmmaker Tony Gerber].
L.N.: I wasn’t. My mother was a schoolteacher who eventually became a principal. She was a pragmatist, an activist. But my grandmother was a storyteller. She grew up in a moment in time when she didn’t have the tools to tell her story. She was a teenage mother. She didn’t go to college. She had to go to work at an early age. She was a great raconteur.
R.A.G.: So maybe it was generational. A long legacy.
L.N.: When you and I were shaping some of the language of “This House,” there was a character whose voice I was struggling with.
R.A.G.: Which one?
L.N.: Lucy. I realized, “Oh, the character is a poet. I’m going to step aside and let you, a poet, inhabit the character.” You were able to find this self-possessed, radical woman. Sometimes I envy the access that you have to a certain level of imagination and language that I struggle with.
R.A.G.: I don’t feel jealous; I feel intimidated.
L.N.: By having this conversation, we’re getting to articulate things that I feel instinctively but that we never actually talk about.
R.A.G.: Collaborating with you has clarified something for me: that the older I get, the more I’m able to see your worth as an artist, and I’m proud of it. But I want to be my own writer — and that’s possible.
Interview has been edited and condensed.
