A Strange Loop’s Michael R Jackson: ‘I wrote this show as a little lifeboat at a very uncertain time’
msn.comAmerican musical, and Jackson has been hailed as a genius. The writer speaks to me from the remote Irish island of Inisheer, where he is taking a few weeks’ rest.
It follows a frenetic few years in which A Strange Loop first opened Off-Broadway in 2019, before moving to Broadway two years later and started hoovering up awards. “It’s breathtaking”, Jackson says. “This is an overblown term, but only now, being here, am I feeling the ‘post traumatic stress’ of having squeezed so much of myself into this show.
It’s not that I feel like I gave too much, but I did give a lot. ”There’s no simple way of explaining what A Strange Loop is about.
Its title references a term in cognitive neuroscience about how “the ability of oneself to call oneself an ‘I’ can only come from referring back to yourself” – hmm – but at its most basic it’s about a fat, queer, black theatre usher called Usher who is trying to write a musical about a fat, black, queer theatre usher trying to write a musical.
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