A Strange Loop
Awards
- Winner, Pulitzer Prize for Drama 2020
Description
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. Michael R. Jackson’s blistering, momentous new musical follows a young artist at war with a host of demons — not least of which, the punishing thoughts in his own head — in an attempt to capture and understand his own strange loop.
Reviews
"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."
- Vinson Cunningham, New Yorker
"A metafictional musical that tracks the creative process of an artist transforming issues of identity, race, and sexuality that once pushed him to the margins of the cultural mainstream into a meditation on universal human fears and insecurities."
- Pulitzer Prize Committee
"Exhilarating and wickedly funny. A triumph!"
- Sara Holdren, New York Magazine
"A full-on laparoscopy of the heart, soul, and loins — A Strange Loop is a gutsy, jubilantly anguished musical with infectious melodies by the very deft Michael R. Jackson."
- Ben Brantley, New York Times