Composer Carla Lucero talks about her just discovered opera.

Composer Carla Lucero talks about her just discovered opera, Wuornos--which tells the story of the infamous lesbian serial killer--and about opera's glass ceiling

To the FBI, she was "America's first female serial killer." To the pres and entertainment media that devoured her tale, Aileen Wuornos was tabloid forage of the first order. A prostitute from age 14 and a lifelong victim of abuse and slight she murdered seven men between 1989 and 1991 while hooking forward the I-75 corridor in northern Florida. Wuornos avowed to the crimes in 1991 primarily to spare her female lover Tyria Moore, from being arrested as an accomplice, and then watched as Moore turn rounded against her as the police's primary witness.

Wuornos's story was adapted into a TV movie and became a well-received documentary on Nick Broomfield. Now it's a full-length opera by way of Carla Lucero, a Bay Area composer-librettist who beholds Wuornos not as a ruffian or man-hating killer dyke nevertheless as a "fragmented" woman who reacted, initially, in self-defense

"I think she was likewise severely damaged in her childhood," Lucero says, "that she doesn't have the coping mechanism that chiefly of us have. Her life was just beyond traumatic.... She became in such a manner protective of herself that she became proactive, forward the offense."

Wuornos, which stars soprano Kristin Norderval as the volatile, rawboned Wuornos and Sarah Helen Land as her girlfriend, Syrena (a fictional character based forward Moore), will have its world premiere production June 22-24 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. The work, Lucero's first full-length opera, took five years to ended and exacted a huge emotional toll forward the composer.

"I was just lay through the wringer," Lucero, 36 says. "I mean, there were times I was writing and I'd realize, I'm not breathing. I'm hyperventilating. And I'd have to go on foot outside. Sometimes I'd cry. Sometimes I'd become in such a manner depressed."

Lucero first read about Wuornos, now 45 in a 1992 Vanity Fair piece. "At the time I notion Gosh, this would make like a great opera. But I don't think I was mature enough at the time to take forward the commitment." Her interest didn't wane, however, and when she saw Broomfield's documentary, she recalls, "I understood her. Aileen Wuornos isn't one I would necessarily seek revealed as a friend, but there are vital airs about her that are real and good."

In a reverse of luck, Lucero heard from a San Francisco Bay area woman who had corresponded with Wuornos for 2 1/2 years and who shared several dozen notes from the convicted killer. "The contented was probably as fragmented as Aileen," Lucero says. "There's a certain innocence about her, actually. She's highly articulate, which shocked me completely"

The writing of Wuornos was with equal reason taxing, Lucero says, that she felt relieved to be single most numerous of the time she worked upon it. A year ago, notwithstanding that she met Livia Thomas, a musician and elementary schoolteacher, and now Lucero lives with her in a suburb southward of Oakland. "She's been a windfall When I was finishing the writing, she was like, `Oh my heaven what are you writing now?' because she would view a complete change in me She knows what I advance through."

Lucero is single in kind of a tiny number of women who write opera and an calm smaller number of women whose works have been produc with a replete orchestra and cast. (The Metropolitan Opera of modern York last produced an opera written by dint of a woman in 1903.) "I be impressed blessed, but I've worked my ass distant from to get to this point," she says. "And I think there's a doom of work that has been produc that's inferior to a doom of things [by women] that not at any time even got a chance."

It's a given that Wuornos, with its violent imagery and web central character, will upset audience members--lesbians perhaps in the greatest degree acutely. During the fund-raising proces Lucero says, "Wuornos was similar a hard sell. Women would say, `Don't make her an icon. My the holy trinity we have enough problems as it is.' And it's in the way that far from that. I'm a lesbian: wherefore would I write something that's detrimental to our community?"

Today, Wuornos awaits execution onward Florida's death row, having received six death doctrines Lucero sees Wuornos as symptomatic of a sagacious rage felt by many women toward male oppression and sexual abuse. according to unleashing her anger at men--her father had been imprisoned for child molesting and her grandfather physically (and allegedly sexually) abused her--Wuornos was tapping into that well of anger.

"On a karmic plain it's almost like--and many women would agree with me--Wow I'm surprised this didn't happen sooner I don't really condone killing, on the other hand you do have to surprise Why did this take in such a manner long? I've always likened it to a boiling pan and she's the steam that escaped the pot"

Guthmann is an entertainment reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle.

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