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A radical, metafictional musical wherein a queer black writer confronts the impossibility of fully understanding the self.
About the author
Michael R. Jackson was one of
Time magazine's 100 most influential people of 2022. His Pulitzer Prize– and New York Drama Critics’ Circle–winning
A Strange Loop (which had its 2019 world premiere at Playwrights Horizons in association with Page 73 Productions) received 11 Tony nominations in 2022, and was called a full-on laparoscopy of the heart, soul, and loins as well as a gutsy, jubilantly anguished musical with infectious melodies by Ben Brantley for
The New York Times. In addition to
A Strange Loop, he also wrote book, music, and lyrics for
White Girl in Danger, and the book and lyrics for
Teeth, which opened at New World Stages in Fall 2024. Awards and associations include: a New Professional Theatre Festival Award, a Jonathan Larson Grant, a Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award, an ASCAP Foundation Harold Adamson Lyric Award, a Whiting Award, the Helen Merrill Award for Playwriting, an Outer Critics Circle Award, a Drama Desk Award, an Obie Award, a Fred Ebb Award, a Windham-Campbell Prize, a Dramatist Guild Fellowship, and he is an alum of Page 73’s Interstate 73 Writers Group.
Summary
Winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Drama
“To watch this show is to enter, by some urgent, bawdy magic, an ecstatic and infinitely more colorful version of the famous surreal lithograph by M. C. Escher: the hand that lifts from the page, becoming almost real, then draws another hand, which returns the favor. Which came first? A Strange Loop is complex, teasing, thrilling.” —Vinson Cunningham, New Yorker
Usher is a Black, queer writer, working a day job he hates while writing his original musical: a piece about a Black, queer writer, working a day job he hates while writing his original musical. This blistering musical follows a young artist at war with a host of demons—not least of which are the punishing thoughts in his own head—in an attempt to understand his own strange loop.
Foreword
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Additional text
"To watch this show is to enter, by some urgent, bawdy magic, an ecstatic and infinitely more colorful version of the famous surreal lithograph by M. C. Escher: the hand that lifts from the page, becoming almost real, then draws another hand, which returns the favor."
