In the bowels of the brutalist Barbican, the young cast of A Strange Loop are having a tea break. It’s a concept foreign to the musical’s writer, Michael R Jackson. “The first time I got to England,” he says, “I was like, ‘Oh right, I’m American.’ It’s a totally different culture. Like taking tea twice a day during rehearsal – we don’t do that in the US. It takes some getting used to.”
This month, we’ll see whether his show, A Strange Loop, manages to bridge the cultural divide. In the US, it couldn’t have been more highly praised: it won the Pulitzer prize for drama in 2020, then transferred to Broadway in 2022 where it picked up two Tonys, including best musical. Alan Cumming was so impressed he invested money in it, and says of Jackson: “It takes such balls to be so vulnerable and to say, ‘This is my story, I’m writing about what I think, and some of it’s not very nice, some of it’s ugly.’ He doesn’t care about offending or not looking good and ultimately it makes it all the better.”
After almost two decades of failing to get his theatrical career off the ground – part of the subject of his gloriously self-reflexive show – Jackson is now a theatrical heavyweight, his status recently cemented by a major profile by Hilton Als in the New Yorker. Even Tyler Perry – the screen mogul whose schlocky output is mercilessly roasted in A Strange Loop – keeps calling. Opening a Pret a Manger bag and extracting a croissant, Jackson coolly explains: “I think I got under his skin.”
In the UK, Perry is most famous for loaning his mansion to Harry and Meghan when they swapped Frogmore Cottage for Beverly Hills. But even if you’re not familiar with his work, Jackson says, you will still enjoy A Strange Loop. “There are lots of Black cultural reference points you may not get off the bat,” he adds, “but you’ll learn as you go.” Jackson is sceptical of the “black out” nights at some theatres, intended for Black audiences only: he enjoys the multiple interpretations a diverse crowd can bring. “When I think about diversity, I’m not just talking about skin colour or gender or sexual orientation. I’m talking about diversity of thought. I’m interested in lots of points of view coming into the theatre and meeting Usher and his Thoughts.”
Usher is the play’s hero, an usher at The Lion King on Broadway, as Jackson once was. He’s writing a musical, A Strange Loop, to show the world what it’s like to “travel the world in a fat, Black, queer body”. The Thoughts are six characters who express his internal monologue as he progresses through life and the show. In New York, the Thoughts were all played by actors who were both Black and queer. In London, he says: “They’re all Black. I can’t speak to them all being queer, but the fact that all the Thoughts are British queers the piece in a certain sense.”
Where does he stand on only casting queer actors in queer roles? “I’m certainly not against it and I would like gay actors in the mix, but the queerness has to do with perception and the ways reference points are turned on their head and refracted, and how the material lives in different people’s bodies. Whether you’re gay or not is only one part of that.”
Jackson is 42: A Strange Loop’s progress from its origins to London’s Barbican has taken almost his entire adult life. Having graduated from a play-writing course at New York University and living “in the middle of nowhere” in Queens, he recalls: “I was very uncertain of my place in the world and didn’t know what I was going to do. So I began this thinly veiled personal monologue that was a testimony of what it felt like to be a young person around 2003. Operation Iraqi Freedom was about to start, so it was a very tense time.”
Jackson performed this monologue in 2006, then decided he “didn’t want it to be a cabaret piece”. Nor did he want to be in it, even though he is an excellent singer, with perfect pitch. Some rewrites later, A Strange Loop was full of mashups of Jackson’s own songs with those by Liz Phair, part of a “holy trinity” of his teenage musical heroes, the other two being Joni Mitchell and Tori Amos. When Jackson finally tracked Phair down to ask permission, things did not go as planned. “She said, ‘No, you can’t use the songs and you should write your own’ – which ended up being really great advice.”
Strange Loop?, the closing song on Phair’s debut album Exile in Guyville, led Jackson to the work of US scientist (and fellow Pulitzer-winner) Douglas Hofstadter and his theory of the strange loop. This, Jackson says, is “the notion that consciousness and one’s ability to conceive of oneself as an I – that’s shorthand for millions of molecules of reference points, and your identity as a consciousness can only be defined by a system of mirrors mirroring themselves internally. It’s hard to pin down because it’s a reflection of a reflection. It’s a hand drawing a hand, like MC Escher.” Despite the mind-bending nature of this theory, “this concept of consciousness was weirdly what the piece kind of already was.”
As the show suggests, in its depictions of Usher’s family life, Jackson found his artistic voice in spite of some opposition. He was brought up in Detroit in a religious household, played the piano and sang in the church choir. “There was an expected code of behaviour for a young baptist, middle-class, Black kid,” he says. “I was obedient but I was also coming out – so there was a conflict.”
A sympathetic English teacher encouraged him to “push boundaries”, but his holy trinity were also formative. “They’re artists who are uncompromising with themselves. They are fearless but also vulnerable. They say what they mean and they mean what they say. That was deeply inspiring to me as a young person: that you could be that raw and that straightforward in your work.”
His family and church regarded homosexuality as a sin almost on a par with murder. Although fire-and-brimstone-adjacent, their response “wasn’t abusive, but it was sometimes very isolating and not pleasant”. His father found out when Jackson was about 16, after eavesdropping on a phone conversation. Happily, his parents are now hugely proud of his achievements, even if A Strange Loop depicts a strained parents-son relationship in some detail – and vows at the beginning: “There will be butt-fucking!”
“I always caution people about watching A Strange Loop and drawing any conclusions about me,” Jackson says. “My parents have seen it three times. They came to the Tony awards with me. They always want any Strange Loop merchandise, and anytime an article comes out, they’ll want to read it. It’s awesome.”
Jackson fled to university in New York hoping to find his queer tribe but instead ran into what he calls “the gaytriarchy”. The scene, he recalls, “was ruled by white gay men, and nobody was talking about inclusion at all. That was not a thing.” Black, geeky and no gym bunny, Jackson found himself subject to constant rejection. “I developed a lot of anger about that. But a lot of that is internal. It isn’t until you shift your understanding that you can break out of that. It took a long time.”
Years of therapy helped. Last summer, Jackson visited Fire Island, New York’s gay weekend getaway destination. “I remember going there as a young person and going, ‘Oh my God, look at all the beautiful people! I don’t fit in.’ I still felt pangs of that last year, but I was also like, ‘This is so stupid. Everybody here is high out of their minds. I think they’re having a good time in parentheses, but nothing about this is fun for me.’” These days, he calls himself a bachelor. Is he looking? “Yeah, my eyes are open. But I also am not going to compromise just to be with anyone, because I like my own company. You can’t expect another person to validate you. I learned that lesson.”
Throughout his lean years, in which he did other “horrible” jobs such as working as a finance clerk in an ad agency, Jackson had to be entirely self-reliant. So he finds it particularly satisfying that a show born from feelings of isolation has connected so deeply with audiences. During its Broadway run, Jackson was inundated with fans waiting at the stage door who saw their own struggles in Usher’s.
So who will hang around the Barbican stage door? Jackson “desperately” hopes Tracey Ullman (“who I idolise”) will come. “The way she came to the US and was satirising us – I think she’s incredible.” He also hopes to “entice” Tori Amos from her Cornwall home. But ultimately, says this most inclusive of writers, no one should feel excluded from the show. “I think the story has an ability to transcend its American original – and reach everyone.”
• A Strange Loop is at the Barbican, London, from 17 June to 9 September.
