[music]

Host: Michael, oh my God, you're on Broadway. Broadway.

Michael R. Jackson: Yes, it's crazy, right?

[music]

Host: That's Michael R. Jackson, a 41-year-old composer in playwright. His musical A Strange Loop won the Pulitzer prize in 2020. It begins its run on Broadway this month. A Strange Loop is about a man named Usher who also happens to work as an usher. He's a Black queer writer who is writing a musical about a Black queer writer who is writing about a Black queer writer. Usher sings about the terror of the blank page and the terrors of dating and sex and all in terms that are quite frank, which we'll hear in some of the clips played in this interview, just so you're aware.

Staff writer Hilton Als talk with Michael R. Jackson about A Strange Loop.

Hilton Als: One of the things that is so extraordinary about this show is that we have never seen anything remotely like it on stage or in a book or in a movie. There's just been nothing like it, Michael. I wanted to ask you for the folks out there, what was the genesis of you writing a play about a gay musical theater playwright working as an usher, talking about his life while trying to write a musical about AIDS and among other things.

[laughter]

Michael R. Jackson: It started as a monologue initially that I wrote in between graduating from undergrad playwriting and going to grad school for musical theater writing. At the time I was about 22, 23 years old and I was just very uncertain of my place in the world and where I would go with a BFA degree.

Hilton Als: Where did you study?

Michael R. Jackson: I studied at NYU in the Dramatic Writing Program. My friend Keisha had been living in this little lady's house in Jamaica Queens and she got a live-in nanny job in Tribeca. Then I moved into the little lady's house in Jamaica Queens all the way at the last stop on the e-train and the f-train. Then you take a bus from the train to get to her house. I just lived upstairs in this bungalow-style house. I was like, "What am I going to do? I don't know what to do."

My student loans were coming due and my parents wanted to know what I was going to do with my life. America was about to go to war with Iraq and I was just like just this little Black gay boy sitting upstairs in this old lady's house. I started writing this monologue that was about a young Black gay man walking around New York wondering why life was so terrible.

Just reflecting on lots of whatever was going on in the world at that time. I went to grad school about nine months later. I decided to try my hand finally at writing my own song. The song that came out of that was the song Memory Song which would end up being the penultimate song in A Strange Loop.

[music]

Five-foot four, high school gym

Sneaking a cupcake

These are my memories

These are my memories

Shooting hoops off the rim--

Hilton Als: How long was the process between that monologue and you reaching the stage at Playwrights Horizon?

Michael R. Jackson: It was about 16 years.

Hilton Als: Wow.

[music]

Of one lone black gay boy, I knew who chose to turn his back on the Lord

One lone black gay boy I knew who chose to turn his back on the Lord

Hilton Als: You shared with me off radio as it were, your very early love of people like Tori Amos and Linda Ronstadt and all those girls who can sing as they say, but also writing songs that mattered to you a great deal. Do you think that they had a great or at least a galvanizing influence on your writing music and lyrics?

Michael R. Jackson: Yes. I will say first that I grew up in Detroit, Michigan, Motown. My parents grew are like children of the '50s and '60s and '70s. That music like Motown Sound, Philadelphia Sound, all of that stuff was in gospel music. All of that was very much a part of my world as a kid and growing up. That was there. Then within that, my cousin Zanita had gone to Innerleithen and then he got kicked out. What he brought back was the album Under the Pink and Little Earthquakes by Tori Amos, who for whatever reason he thought I might enjoy it.

He gave me her copies of those albums. One night when I was about 15, I decided to listen to Under the Pink. I turned off the lights, put on my headphones, pressed play on the disc man, and then the first thing I hear is,

Tears on the sleeve of a man

Don't want to be a boy today

I was like, "Oh, it's on." It was something about that just reached into my soul. I was just coming out at that time. I was in my most angst-ridden place I could have been as a teenager and this red-haired piano-playing white woman just was reading me for filth. Even though it was her life, it wasn't really about me, but there was something about the way she approached her feelings and her thoughts. The way he ordered her thoughts, the vulnerability, the sexuality, talking about religion because then the next song goes,

God, sometimes you just don't come through.

I was like a Black boy raised up in a Baptist Church, hearing that being gay is bad and you're going to go to hell and AIDS and all that stuff. That music, it gave me a real outlet to really start questioning a lot of what I was raised with and under and around and feeling like it was okay to be a weirdo within my identity category.

Hilton Als: I think that one of the things that is so extraordinary about this piece is your freedom in it. You want to give voice to something that I had never seen and I'm ancient on stage in terms of not only the artistic process for the protagonist but also parallel to his disappointment or experiences in the gay world. The ideas about sexuality and love, can you talk to me a bit about that?

Michael R. Jackson: As I mentioned before I'm from Detroit and I actually came of age in the mid to late '90s as a gay teenager. At a time when the world was slowly starting to move toward acceptance for white gay people. Meanwhile, in my little world, there was a whole bunch of Black gay boys around me. I always call it the Black gay teenage storyline. It was like this little melodrama happening behind the scenes. As I was coming out into that, still felt like an outsider. Even within my own category. Then when I moved to New York, it was like things shifted into what in the show is called Exile in Gayville. The white gays and trying to orient myself to that.

Usher enters the sexual marketplace.

Looking into hung.

You can do this. You can do this.

In terms of being a black gay who didn't fit in with these white gays for all kinds of physical reasons or racial reasons, whatever, but also competing with other black gays for the white attention. Then not measuring up to the black gays competing for the white attention either and the alienation that came from that at that time as somebody who hadn't found any sort of confidence or self-love within his body. Plus just the baggage of having been raised with a lot of homophobia and shame and all of that is always swirling in a loop. One might say. The show itself I just wanted to tackle that and what it feels like to be in the middle of that.

Six-foot-two, 179 pounds, muscular, single, packing in the front and in the back, able to take care of all your anal needs. Just say hi.

Looking into hung. Undetectable pause bottom taking lows in the toilet like a burger on 52nd Street just steps away from industry and therapy, come park it right here, gents. Don't be scurred,

just say hi.

Looking into hung...

Laid-back, nice guy here. No agenda, no drama, just checking things out, maybe looking for a gym buddy, lol. Top, if it goes there. Just say hi, huh.

Hi. Hi.

Too black

Too black

Too black

Your [bleep] too small

Your [bleep] too small

Your [bleep] too small.

When was the last time you got your [bleep] in formation with Beyonce?

Michael R. Jackson: I would go to the LGBT center to these really humiliating speed dating events and not get picked by anyone. Again, it was a predominantly white thing and I couldn't figure out what this-- It was all very confusing.

[music]

Too fat and black to live at all

So why don't you just ravage me

With your white gay Dan Savagery?

Hilton Als: One of the things that is profound about the piece, of course, is the way in which you really talk about the white male gay gays, and how that your protagonist is used to fit uneasily certain kinds of fantasies about black queerness. I wondered, was that experience something that you found as dispiriting as your protagonist, or was it something that you felt that you knew that politically the roots were rotten?

Michael R. Jackson: You mean for Inwood Daddy?

Hilton Als: Yes.

Michael R. Jackson: The Inwood Daddy scene in A Strange Loop is one where a protagonist goes to meet an older white man who he connected with on an app like Grindr or Scruff or something like that. He goes to his apartment in Inwood in Northern Manhattan, and he ends up in a very racist sexual encounter with this man. This man assumes that Usher is into being degraded racially, and he says a lot of disturbing and racist things to him during sex that Usher does not refute.

Hilton Als: He doesn't challenge it.

Michael R. Jackson: Right. That scene and my relationship to it is a really interesting one, because it's very tricky. That white man in that scene is using Usher, the protagonist in a particular way, but Usher the protagonist willingly participates in that. That's part of what the song that he sings after that encounter called Boundaries is about.

[music]

Why did I do that?

What did that do for me?

What a performance.

Where are my boundaries?

I threw my hands up.

For me, it's too easy to say, "Oh, these white men are preying on black boys." There's a truth in that for sure, but there's also another piece of it that somebody comes from a place of desperation, of shame, of low self-esteem. When you come from that place, you will often subjugate yourself to another person thinking that that will get you validation, love, acceptance, whatever. Then when it doesn't, you have to sit with yourself and what your part in that was, and what their part was in it for sure, but what your part was in it.

That's certainly something that I went through in my life, and many times in these kinds of situations, they weren't necessarily as extreme as this but they sometimes felt like they were.

[music]

Why did I do that?

Down on my hands and knees

Why play submissive?

What are my boundaries?

Hilton Als: Do you think that A Strange Loop helped you evolve as a person and to let go of the scenarios that are in the piece?

Michael R. Jackson: Oh, absolutely. I do because the thing about it is that, as I mentioned earlier, I started writing the original monologue as I was building a life raft for myself, to understand myself. It wasn't until I got to a place of understanding that in my life I was caught up in a loop of self-hatred, that I could see what Usher's problem was, and therefore what the structure of the piece was that would lead him out of that and into a better place.

What that meant was in my own life, that it allowed me to get to higher grounds.

[music]

I should stop overthinking

And do the thing that's tough

Unleash my hungry lion

Cause Lord, he's had enough.

Michael R. Jackson: It didn't mean that all my problems went away, but it meant that I could understand my humanity and my selfhood as being something that was not inherently flawed in some way, that I couldn't escape and therefore had to keep trying to fix.

Hilton Als: May the journey never end, Michael.

Michael R. Jackson: The yellow brick road doesn't have to end here. Life is fabulous for ladies after 40.

[laughter]

Hilton Als: Michael, thank you. You're a treasure.

Michael R. Jackson: Thank you. Hilton, I always love talking to you.

Hilton Als: I'll see you very soon.

[music]

Maybe I don't need changing

Maybe I should regroup

Cause change is just an illusion

Just an illusion

Just an illusion

And "I" is just an illusion

Just an illusion

Just an illusion

If thoughts are just an illusion

Just an illusion

Just an illusion

Hilton Als: Michael R. Jackson, talking with staff writer Hilton Als. Jackson's musical, A Strange Loop is in previews on Broadway and it opens on April 26th.

[music]

Strange

Strange

Strange loop.

 

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