“I am a human; nothing that is human is alien to me.” Composer Robert Paterson cites this line from the Roman playwright Terence in defense of his choice, along with librettist David Cote, to write an opera with characters that don’t share his demographic background. “I think there’s too much of that these days,” Paterson writes, “the notion…that if you’re a straight, white, cisgendered [sic] male of European descent, you can’t write a story about lesbians, [or] a postgender couple.” The opera in question is “Three Way,” a triptych of one-act stories about sex that had its New York premiere recently at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In an interview printed in the program, Paterson doubles down on this view, describing the notion that “art can only be created by people who are the characters” as “false logic.”
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