The opera is based on Ms. Nottage’s 2004 play, which is set in 1905 New York and tells the story of a lonely African-American seamstress who sews ladies’ undergarments and courts a laborer working on the Panama Canal through the mail. Since its premiere, the play has appeared several times on lists of the most-produced plays in the nation, and Ms. Nottage has won two Pulitzer Prizes for subsequent works.

Mr. Gordon, whose previous operas include “The House Without a Christmas Tree” and “The Grapes of Wrath,” has written a score for the opera with period touches, influenced by ragtime, cakewalk and the blues. Mr. Bishop said that the opera would feature a cast of 20, who would be accompanied by two pianists. Mr. Sher, the resident director of Lincoln Center Theater, also works regularly at the Met Opera and on Broadway. (He is nominated for a Tony Award this season for directing the play “To Kill a Mockingbird.”)

Other operas developed through the commissioning program are now in the pipeline for future Met productions, including “Eurydice,” by the composer Matthew Aucoin and the librettist Sarah Ruhl, which will have its premiere next year at the Los Angeles Opera before coming to the Met in a few years. The Met also plans to stage Jeanine Tesori’s opera “Grounded,” based on the George Brant play about a pregnant pilot who conducts drone warfare.

But Lincoln Center Theater’s first foray into staging one of the new works is significant, as composers are increasingly moving away from large-scale grand opera and toward more intimate works that are less expensive to stage and easier for small companies to mount.

And in some ways, it is a return to a decades-old dream of opera at the Newhouse.

In 1973, when the theater was still known as the Forum, the Met Opera tried to make it into a “Mini-Met” where it could stage contemporary works, rare chamber operas and Baroque works. In its first — and only — season there, the company presented Virgil Thomson’s “Four Saints in Three Acts” in a production directed and choreographed by Alvin Ailey, and a double-bill of Maurice Ohana’s “Syllabaire pour Phèdre” and Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas.”