NEW YORK — Tyler Perry and Liz Phair are two names you’d never expect to hear mentioned in a Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway show marketed as a “big, Black, queer-ass American musical.”
But the Hollywood titan and the ‘90s alternative rock queen feature prominently in “A Strange Loop,” which is up for 11 Tonys on Sunday.
The brainchild of Michael R. Jackson, “A Strange Loop” centers around the emotional trials and tribulations of an overweight, Black gay writer who works as a Broadway usher. Newcomer Jaquel Spivey makes his Great White Way debut as a mid-twenties character — named Usher — who breaks the fourth wall as his inner thoughts come to life during the ribald and irreverent Lyceum Theatre production.
The 41-year-old Jackson, a Detroit native and graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts has been waiting for this level of recognition for a long time — he started writing “A Strange Loop” as a monologue in 2003.
“I feel excited,” Jackson said about Sunday’s ceremony. “And it feels validating, having spent as much time as I did working on ‘A Strange Loop.’ And so it feels like a recognition of that.
“I just wanted to write something that to me felt like real life ... you know, a depiction of a Black gay man’s experience that was very nuanced, complex and real.”
Jackson, who like his protagonist was a real-life usher on Broadway, claims the show isn’t totally autobiographical.
“I would describe it as emotionally autobiographical. I felt everything to assert itself. But it’s not necessarily a one-to-one ratio of the events in my life,” he said.
Jackson makes no apologies for lampooning Perry’s astronomical success in the show, and contrasts it with how “A Strange Loop’s” protagonist struggles with self-doubt and writer’s block.
In one of the most subversive sequences in the show, Black history icons Harriet Tubman, Carter G. Woodson and even Whitney Houston rise from the dead to scold Usher about his blistering criticism of Perry.
Tubman becomes so incensed by his bad attitude toward the popular movie icon, she starts spewing the N-word and chasing after Usher with a rifle.
Jackson insists he doesn’t have anything personal against the “Madea Goes to Jail” filmmaker.
“My issue is really just an artistic one,” he told The News. “I would say I don’t have any personal issues with him. But his work looms large, and it’s something that as a Black writer is often sort of presented as ‘why don’t you write something like what Tyler Perry writes?’ Or ‘why don’t you write for Tyler Perry?’
“That’s something that’s certainly been suggested to me in the past in my history as an artist,” he continued.
Phair, however, fares better than Perry in the show.
Jackson, who met Phair in 2019 and said she’s “aware” of “A Strange Loop,” was a huge fan of the artist when he was younger and pays tribute to her in the show. “Strange Loop” is the name of the play he is writing, and also the name of a Phair song. Usher explains to someone in the musical that it’s actually a science term about how sense of self is a kind of illusion, and how the ability to recognize the illusion proves your existence.
A song that in the musical, “Exile in Gayville,” takes its name from “Exile in Guyville,” a 1993 Phair song.
“I think she’s a great artist and somebody who I was very inspired by and I think that she has a real lyrical brilliance,” Jackson said.
“I think that her way of writing from her own point of view is so sharp. I just think that she just writes so honestly, with such truthfulness from her work, and I was very inspired by it.”
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