A Strange Loop (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

by Michael R. Jackson

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781559369947
Publisher:	Theatre Communications Group
Publication date:	01/19/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	846,988
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Michael R. Jackson holds a BFA and MFA in playwriting and Musical Theatre Writing from the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. As a songwriter, he has seen his work performed everywhere from Joe’s Pub to NAMT. He wrote book, music, and lyrics for the musical White Girl In Danger. He also wrote lyrics and book for the musical adaptation of the 2007 horror film Teeth with composer and co-bookwriter Anna K. Jacobs. He is an alum of the Johnny Mercer Writers Colony, the Ars Nova Uncharted Writers Group, and was a Sundance Theater Institute Composer Fellow. He has received a 2019 Whiting Award, a 2017 Jonathan Larson Grant, a 2017 Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award, a 2017 ASCAP Foundation Harold Adamson Award, a 2016/2017 Dramatist Guild fellowship, and was the 2017 Williamstown Theatre Festival Playwright-In-Residence. He has commissions from Grove Entertainment & Barbara Whitman Productions and LCT3.

Editorial Reviews

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

Time Out New York - Helen Shaw

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.”

Vogue - Adam Green

"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."

New York Times - Ben Brantley

"Exhilarating and wickedly funny. A triumph!"

New York Magazine - Sara Holdren

"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?"

New Yorker - Vinson Cunningham

"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