12/19/2023 0 Comments Spiral review spoilers![]() ![]() He finds joy in the songs of his “inner white girl,” but acknowledges that society might never grant him the free-spiritedness he craves. He dreams of finding articulation on the page, but is haunted by audiences (both white and Black) who will misunderstand his work. The unifying theme between all of Usher’s conflicting thoughts is self-doubt. The constant interplay between the Thoughts heightens their cruelty and playfulness, paradoxically underlining each performer’s individuality. They effortlessly shift from playing abstract ideas to historical figures to real-life family members. Usher’s consciousness is conjured onstage through a six-person ensemble embodying his “Thoughts.” The ensemble is played by a stellar group of performers, all of whom were in the off-Broadway cast (L Morgan Lee, James Jackson Jr., John-Michael Lyles, John-Andrew Morrison, Jason Veasey, and Antwayn Hopper). theatre.Įchoing the chaos of a wrenching creative process, A Strange Loop cycles through multiple interconnected elements all at once, colliding hushed intimacy with unabashed profanity. The musical has more in common with Woolly Mammoth’s past productions of experimental Black plays (like Fairview or An Octoroon) than the reworkings of classic musicals typically seen in D.C. Woolly Mammoth isn’t known for producing musicals, yet it makes sense for A Strange Loop to be staged here. production of A Strange Loop was announced in March of 2020, right before the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered theatre across America, and right before Jackson’s won 2020’s Pulitzer Prize for Drama for the show. This production at Woolly Mammoth comes after the show’s much-lauded off-Broadway production in the summer of 2019, produced by Playwrights Horizons and Productions. Jackson himself carries all of the same identities as Usher, and watching the show feels like peering over the playwright’s shoulder as he struggles to write for the stage in real time. A Strange Loop is a shrewd work of autofiction. ![]() Usher is trying to write a musical about someone with all of those same identities, someone who also is writing a show about someone with all of those same identities, someone who also… and so on, and so on. The company of A Strange Loop | Photo: Teresa Castracane It’s the boldest musical I’ve ever seen on a stage.Ī Strange Loop follows Usher (a superb Jaquel Spivey), who introduces himself in the show’s first moments as “a young overweight-to-obese homosexual and/or gay and/or queer, cisgender male, able-bodied university-and-graduate-school educated, musical-theater writing, Disney-ushering, broke-ass middle-class far-Left-leaning Black-identified-and-classified American descendant of slaves full of self-conscious femme energy thinks he’s probably a vers bottom.” By turns heartbreaking and hilarious, A Strange Loop is a masterful piece of theatre. A Strange Loop uses every aspect of musical theatre in order to strip away Jackson’s identity, line by line, until the very act of creation can be contested. Jackson’s invigorating exploration of identity now playing at Washington, D.C.’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company. There’s a similar kind of transformation occurring in A Strange Loop, Michael R. Smith calls attention to language on the level of the sentence until speaking itself becomes tentative, beguiling, and unresolved. ![]() The poem’s response to this lingering memory is to slowly erase a dismissive thought, line by line. But the disease still carries a traumatic weight in his own life, and still disproportionately affects Black gay men in America. Smith writes:Īs a “Black, Queer, Poz writer & performer,” Smith understands that contracting HIV may no longer be a “death sentence” in the 2010s. The speaker is recounting a sexual encounter that possibly led him to contracting HIV, an act he remembers in a sensory collage of sweat, salt, and desire. There’s a stanza in Danez Smith’s poem “ -a love story-” that I’ll never be able to forget. ![]()
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