A Strange Loop

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.

Michael R. Jackson was one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people of 2022. His Pulitzer Prize and New York Drama Critics' Circlewinning A Strange Loop 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.

'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'

'An exhilarating cocktail of hilarious lyrical complexity… Michael R. Jackson is a musical talent with deep wells of invention'

'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'

'Brilliant… Harrowing… one-of-a-kind… Hyper-observant and hyper-verbal, Jackson lets his remorselessly satirical eye wander, to hilarious and devastating effect… What makes A Strange Loop so powerful, is not an attempt to find "our common humanity" but an insistence on speaking its own idiosyncratic truth'

'Phenomenal... both a raw and unflinching interrogation of identity and the most furiously entertaining show on Broadway'

'Triumphant, emotionally lacerating... I sat with my mouth agape, astonished and grateful that something so brutally honest and rigorously constructed had finally broken through to a Broadway stage'

'Broadway's best new musical... dazzlingly one-of-a-kind... explosively imaginative... will redefine the parameters of a big commercial hit'

'Audacious and uproarious... a meta masterpiece'