this winter, I saw something pecu-
liar: two marquees advertising two
Michael Jacksons. On 52nd Street,
at the Neil Simon Theater, where
‘‘MJ: The Musical’’ has been running
since December, there’s a graphic of
the King of Pop in his iconic early
’90s pose: fedora perched low,
obscuring his face; shirttails fl ying
in the artifi cial wind; white glove;
high-water pants; sparkling socks;
feet en pointe. Seven blocks away, at
the Lyceum Theater on 45th Street,
another sign bore the name ‘‘Michael
Jackson’’ and an illustration of a
20-something Black man’s head in
semi-profi le, with six tiny bodies
fl oating around his face and hair.
This image advertised ‘‘A Strange
Loop,’’ the playwright Michael R.
Jackson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning
metafi ctional musical, which pre-
miered on Broadway in April.
‘‘It’s a strange loop,’’ Jackson
told me on the phone when I
mentioned the coincidence. He
chuckled, his buoyant, lisp-tinged
laughter calling to mind fl uttering
shirttails. ‘‘See what I did there?’’
He stopped, started again, wanting
to clarify. ‘‘When I say that, I mean
that, my whole identity as a person
just in the world, has always been
sort of tied to that man, because
of our names. That’s been both an
annoyance and a help.’’
Jackson has embraced the absur-
dity of the coincidence — his web-
site name and Instagram handle
is ‘‘thelivingmichaeljackson,’’ for
example. ‘‘Certainly whenever my
name is mentioned, the ghost of
him appears somewhere. But we’re
two very diff erent artists working
in two very diff erent traditions.’’ He
paused, punctuating his thinking
with ellipsis, his voice relaxed and
slowly propulsive, as if his sentences
were bridges he was building as he
walked over them. ‘‘And yet, there’s
something about his legacy that is
invoked whenever my name comes
up. There’s a certain excitement that
comes up, and maybe I’ve been able
to utilize that. I think that’s true.
And I think that maybe it’s given
me a certain kind of confi dence,
perhaps, as somebody in the enter-
tainment world because ‘Michael
Jackson’ stands for pop excellence
and razzmatazz and razzle-dazzle,
and that’s certainly something that
I aspire to in my own work.’’
‘‘A Strange Loop,’’ which is being
marketed as a ‘‘big, Black, queer-ass
American musical,’’ is in part about
how identity is cobbled together out
of the fl otsam of pop culture: how
the faces we present to the world
are neither organic nor stolen, but
co-opted, borrowed and reshaped in
the borrowing. Jackson relishes the
playfulness at work in these kinds
of appropriations, and the show
bristles with references as varied
as Bravo’s ‘‘Real Housewives’’ fran-
chise; the writing of bell hooks; Dan
Savage, the advice columnist; ‘‘Ham-
ilton’’; Stephen Sondheim. The title
carries its own layers of reference: to
Liz Phair’s 1993 song ‘‘Strange Loop’’
and to the work of Douglas Hofstad-
ter, the scholar of cognitive science
and comparative literature. In his
1979 book ‘‘Gödel, Escher, Bach: An
Eternal Golden Braid,’’ Hofstadter
coined the term ‘‘a strange loop’’
to describe the recursive nature of
selfhood and intelligence.
The show is a product of Jackson’s
own vicissitudinous loops: his fi ts and
starts of success and failure, when
he was working, for fi ve years, as an
usher at ‘‘The Lion King’’ and ‘‘Mary
Poppins’’ while revising his own
play over and over and over again,
trying not to give up. Jackson says
that the show is not autobiograph-
ical but ‘‘self-referential,’’ though
the parallels between him and his
protagonist are striking. The story
concerns Usher (played with vulner-
ability, charm and delicacy by Jaquel
Spivey), a 25-year-old ‘‘fat American
Black gay man of high intelligence,
low self-image and deep feelings.’’
Like his creator, Usher works as
an usher for ‘‘The Lion King’’ and
shares his name with a pop star. (In
the memory palace of his mind, hisrelatives are named for ‘‘Lion King’’
characters: His mother and father are
called Sarabi and Mufasa, his niece
is Nala, his ne’er-do-well brother is
Scar.) He ‘‘writes stories and songs
and wants desperately to be heard.’’
Usher is trying to develop his
own musical — about a Disney usher
who’s writing an original musical
about an usher who’s writing a musi-
cal, and so on — as he deals with the
impositions of his mind, which are
personifi ed as six Greek- chorus-like
‘‘Thoughts’’ who voice his desires
and cutting internal commentary.
The Thoughts (played by L Morgan
Lee, James Jackson Jr., John-Michael
Lyles, John-Andrew Morrison, Jason
Veasey and Antwayn Hopper) are ‘‘a
spectrum of bodies that are Usher’s
perceptions of reality inside and
out.’’ They ‘‘come in many shapes
and sizes. But they are all Black. And
they are as individual in expression
as they are a unit.’’
Usher must reconcile the seeming
contradictions of his life. He is gay
but was raised religious and taught
that homosexuality would send him
to hell. He uses Grindr but consid-
ers himself a feminist — someone
who can see through the race- and
body-shaming that frequently occur
on dating apps. He yearns to be
himself and pursue his own artistic
inclinations yet feels pressure to pay
his parents back for their support by
ghostwriting a Tyler Perry play. In
the musical’s scintillating, uproari-
ous opening number, ‘‘Intermission
Song,’’ Usher declares that he wants
to ‘‘subvert expectations Black and
white, from the left and the right, for
the good of the culture.’’ This idea
of subverting expectations — of
presenting art that grinds the gears
of easy understanding to a halt — is
crucial to Jackson’s work.
One day, Jackson and I sat togeth-
er in a Chelsea diner and discussed
a play we’d both recently seen (a
period piece that Jackson asked me
not to name). He detected in the
show the urge in many contempo-
rary works of art to retrofi t current
attitudes onto historical matters.
‘‘Everybody keeps trying to speak
to the moment ,’’ he said, and punctu-
ated his words by tapping the menu
on the table, improvising his own
percussive track. ‘‘There’s so much
presentism in so many works, par-
ticularly the ones that are dealingwith historical issues. I’m kind of
like, Why is there this weird rewrit-
ing of history so that it can fl atter
you and validate you? Why can’t we
just tell stories about these people as
they were and whatever their posi-
tions and attitudes were? I think that
that’s actually a lot more powerful,
because then you can understand
how other people lived and thought
and dreamed and made mistakes or
whatever. I keep seeing all of this
stuff that’s like, This is just like right
now, and I’m like, No it isn’t!’’
The show we discussed treated
almost every white character as
evil but didn’t give that behavior
any emotional or psychological
foundation. Yes, racism is ridicu-
lous, but the people who subscribe
to it don’t feel that way; if charac-
terization is to be believable, it has
to accurately and seriously portray
even the views that belong to abhor-
rent people. Otherwise you get what
Toni Morrison called ‘‘harangue
passing off as art,’’ and characters
who are mere vehicles for political
arguments. ‘‘There’s a nuance that I
feel is being lost in this moment in
time, particularly in the arts, in the
theater especially, that I am person-
ally at war with,’’ Jackson said.
Jackson is dead set against con-
temporary virtuousness: a puritani-
cal need for fi xed, context-repellent
delineations of right and wrong; the
performance of utmost certainty, all
the time. ‘‘A Strange Loop’’ is dedi-
cated to feelings of uncertainty, pre-
senting, with vivid detail, the internal
logic of a character who’s fi ghting
with himself. The self is arguably
everyone’s fi rst and most recurrent
battleground, and Jackson stages
internal chaos that far outstrips
arguments you might fi nd between
partisan politicians or on Twitter.
One of Usher’s Thoughts is called
‘‘Your Daily Self-Loathing,’’ and as
you’d expect, it regularly reminds
him of how worthless he is. Another
Thought is the supervisor of Usher’s
‘‘sexual ambivalence’’; others rep-
resent his loving mother’s religious
upbraiding and his father’s confused,
macho judgment; others stand in for
student-loan collectors and an oppor-
tunistic agent. With all of this at play,
Usher has to fi nd a way to assert his
own value or to ‘‘fi ght for his right to
live in a world that chews up and spits
out Black queers on the daily,’’ but40 5.8.22
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